Joyce James

1922 · ref. 142260 — Paris: Shakespeare and Company 1922. First edition of Joyce's masterpiece one of 750 numbered copies printed on handmade paper from a total edition of 1000 copies this is number number 817. Thick quarto original blue and white wrappers. In very good condition with some expert restoration to the spine and a crease to the front wrapper which has been coloured. Housed in a custom half morocco chemise and clamshell box. Ulysses was published in Paris by Shakespeare & Company 1922. It was a struggle for the author to find a publisher a comic irony considering that Ulysses is "universally hailed as the most influential work of modern times" Grolier Joyce 69. Ulysses was an immediate success. The first printing sold out and "within a year Joyce had become a well-known literary figure. Ulysses was explosive in its impact on the literary world of 1922" de Grazia 27. Even so the book faced difficulties in global reception. It was banned in the U.K. and was prosecuted for the obscenity in the Nausicaa episode Ellmann 1982. Joyce's inspiration for the novel began as a young boy reading Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses and writing an essay entitled "My Favorite Hero" after being impressed by the wholeness of the character Goreman 1939. The idea for the novel grew from a story in Dubliners in 1906 which Joyce expanded into a short book in 1907 before reconceptualizing it as the heady novel in 1914 Ellmann 1982. The book can initially seem unstructured and chaotic and Joyce admitted that he "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant" The Observer 2000. The French translator Stuart Gilbert published a defense of Ulysses shortly after its publication in which he supported the novel's use of obscenity and explained its internal structure and links to the Odyssey against accusations of ambiguity. Every episode Gilbert explained is connected to the Odyssey by theme technique and correspondence between characters. Another instance of Ulysses' literary contribution is his use of stream-of-consciousness a technique employing carefully structured prose both humorous and charactering and involving puns and parodies. Joyce was a precursor to the use of stream of consciousness in the later decades. Similar narrative techniques were used by his contemporaries Virginia Wolfe William Faulkner and Italo Svevo. Their style can be better characterized as an "interior monologue rather than stream of consciousness is the appropriate term for the style in which subjective experience is recorded both in The Waves and in Woolf's writing generally" Stevenson 1992. Shakespeare and Company unknown