Ulysses - Hardcover

James Joyce

3.75

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1587262851 ISBN 13: 9781587262852

Publisher: Ann Arbor Media Group, 2005

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The Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941) believed that patterns of human behavior, unconsciously drawn from history of myth, endlessly repeat themselves. So when he decided to tell the story of three Dubliners on one ordinary day, he loosely fashioned their wanderings after those in Homer's Odyssey. On June 16, 1904 (the date of Joyce's first walk with his future wife and now known as Bloomsday, Stephen Dedalus (standing in for Telemachus) and Leopold Bloom (Odysseus) traverse the city, visiting a newspaper office, a funeral, a library, several pubs, a hospital, and a brothel before eventually meeting. Bloom's wife, Molly (Penelope), waits at home, though with something less than the pure faithfulness of her prototype. Joyce sought to accurately convey his characters' thoughts, and so relied on interior, stream-of-consciousness monologues to put the reader inside their often chaotic minds. At heart a comic writer, he also used parody, puns, and hyperbole to great effect. For its inventiveness, depth, and complexity, Ulysses is often nominated as the greatest novel in the English language.

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