Ulysses

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish writer James Joyce, published in full in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, after parts of it had appeared in The Little Review from 1918 onwards.

The book takes place over one day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, and follows three people through it. Stephen Dedalus is a young man with literary ambitions and a difficult relationship with his family and his faith; Leopold Bloom sells advertising space, is Jewish in a city that does not let him forget it, and spends the day moving about; Molly Bloom is his wife, and her own account of her life closes the novel. The narrative changes its technique from episode to episode rather than keeping to one method, which is one reason the book was treated first as a scandal and then as the central work of literary modernism. It is the Latinised name of Odysseus, and the book sets up a running parallel between Bloom's day and Homer's poem.