James Joyce James Joyce (1882-1941) Joyce was an Irishman of a very large middle-class Catholic family, the Jesuits being responsible for his education. Joyce's schooldays under the Jesuits provide much of the material for the earlier chapters of his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At school he won scholarship after scholarship, thus alleviating his family's deteriorating finances. At the same time his opposition to the social and religious conventions was growing into open rebellion. He eventually rejected Catholicism and embraced an aesthetic philosophy. He came under the influence of Ibsen. Joyce's admired both Ibsen's intellectual honesty and his choice of exile; and just as Ibsen's work was being attacked as "subversive", so Joyce's writing was to meet with similar hostility. Joyce studied modern languages and proved to be a brilliant linguist (a quality which is apparent in the polyglot puns of his later works). After his degree, Joyce went to Paris, where he met expatriate Irish nationalists as well as various literary figures. He met Nora Barnacle, a simple country girl who was to be his lifelong companion, and with her left Ireland for voluntary exile on the Continent. They settled first in Croatia, and then moved to Trieste. Here he taught and worked on his early books. He made friends with Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), at that time an unknown author whose two early novels (Una Vita and Senilità) had been ignored by the critics. In 1914, Dubliners was published. It was not very successful in commercial terms, but it attracted the interest of intelligent critics, notably Ezra Pound, who eventually became Joyce's most helpful friend and critic. Ezra Pound publicized and financed Joyce's works. In Zurich he worked on his new novel, Ulysses, which was to take him seven years to write. In the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of Paris, Joyce felt able to push his technical experimentation to the limit in his last work, Finnegans Wake. With the outbreak of war, Joyce returned to Zurich, where he died. Works Joyce's life and works are in a sense the same thing, since his entire development as a personality is also the development of his works as style and form. Prose * Dubliners (1914), a collection of 15 short stories dealing with life in Dublin, linked by their common theme of the decay and stagnation of the city's life. * A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), deals with the growth to maturity of a young Irishman and his dedication to art; it is largely autobiographical, but the style is less "realistic" than in Dubliners. * Ulysses (1922), generally regarded as Joyce's masterpiece. * Finnegans Wake (1939) is Joyce's last work, even more complex than Ulysses. It is about one night in the life of a Dublin publican, H.C. Earwicker, whose life story turns out to be that of all mankind. By making use of Giambattista Vico's cyclical view of history as a repetition of the same essential experiences, he Continua »