James Joyce - A Biography

Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941) is regarded as one of the greatest, most innovative literary talents of the twentieth century. Joyce revolutionised the structure of the modern novel.

James Joyce Biography

The Irish Biographies Series

by David Pritchard

Publisher: Geddes & Grosset (2001)

ISBN: 1-84205-049-4

Synopsis

Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941) is regarded as one of the greatest, most innovative literary talents of the twentieth century. Joyce revolutionised the structure of the modern novel.

Chamber Music (1907), Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15) were widely acclaimed. His seminal work, Ulysses (1922) provoked violent reactions. Its explicitness, groundbreaking interior monologues and complex references were heralded as genius by some but deemed obscene by others.

In Finnegan's Wake (1939), he stretched language to its very limits, combining portmanteau words with the stream of consciousness narrative established in Ulysses, in an extremely difficult style which still never lost sight of comedy and lyricism.

Unconventional in his writing and in his life, Joyce left a legacy that has shaped the novel as we know it, yet has never been matched.