James Joyce Annotated Bibliography

Joyce's modernistic view of Dublin society permeates all of his writings. The Irish experiences account for a large portion of Joyce's writings. Stephen Dedalus is sometimes Joyce's pseudonym and represents Joyce and his life in Joyce's works. Joyce plays a crucial role in the modernist movement in literature. Some of the well known innovative techniques used by Joyce are symbolism, realism and stream-of consciousness. James Joyce's writings contain autobiographical matter and display his view of life in Dublin, Ireland with the use of symbolism, realism, and stream-of consciousness.

Joyce was born into a middle-class, Catholic family in Dublin, Ireland on February 2, 1882 and wrote all his works about that city, even though he lived outside Ireland from 1904 on. The family's lack of financial prosperity forced them to move to an impoverished area in North Dublin. Joyce's parents still managed to send him to Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College and later to the University College in Dublin, where Joyce became increasingly committed to language and literature as a champion of Modernism. He lived in poverty and obscurity until 1922. Joyce's concern with life among the Irish lower middle class is reflected in his works, such as Dubliners (Gifford 150). One writer said that Joyce revolutionized the treatment of plot and characterization in fiction (Gifford 20). Many critics consider William Shakespeare his only rival as a master of the English Language (Gifford 21). He died on January 13, 1941 in Zurich.

Joyce wrote a short-story collection, Dubliners, which was published in 1914. Many incidents and characters in Dubliners can be shown to have origin in real personalities whom Joyce would have known and to be based on experiences he and others had undergone (www.jamesjoyce.ie). This shows the novel's relation to Joyce's life. Joyce conveyed his view of everyday life in Dublin through this book. Joyce saw himself giving people "some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of every-day life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own" (McCourt 52). Joyce's approach to Dubliners was complete - to show forth in "a style of scrupulous meanness" what he called "the significance of trivial things" and the paralytic subservience of Dubliners to family, Church, and State (McCourt 52). This book, like all of Joyce's works, contains autobiographical matter and is rooted in "an intensely accurate apprehension of the detail of the Dublin life" (www.jamesjoyce.ie). Joyce writes about the experience of modern urban life in Dublin.

The portrait of "a dismal, enervated provincial world" that Joyce draws in Dubliners must owe its realism in part to Joyce's admiration for plays by Ibsen, a Norwegian dramatist that influenced Joyce's writing (Phillips 16). Joyce has said that the book is "an attempt to represent certain aspects of the life of one of the European capitals" (Phillips 17). In Dubliners, Joyce chooses to re-embody the details of a Dublin life he knew intimately in a context where they would inter-relate with one another to compose an "interpretative statement about the city as a whole" (Brown xxxvi). This book establishes a vision of life in the capital which serves as a metaphor for the spiritual condition of the Irish nation as a whole. Dublin had endured almost a century of decline by the early 20th century. According to Terence Brown, money plays a distinctive role in Dubliners and Joyce concentrates his attention on a fairly narrow strand of Dublin society (xx). Dubliners remains a work of art that compels attention by "its controlling sense of the truths of human experience as its author discerned them in a defeated, colonial city" (Brown xlv). Joyce's "intention was to write a chapter of the moral history" of his country and he chose Dublin because the city seemed to him "the center of paralysis" (Joyce 15). The stories are given structural unity by their arrangement into four main points of view: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life (Gammel 168). Dubliners revolves around the everyday lives of men, women, and children n the Irish capital of Dublin and is based on real people and places that were part of Joyce's life.

Shortly after his mother's death, in place of Stephen Hero, Joyce wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was based on the events of his life (Gifford 160). In this largely autobiographical novel, Joyce wrote that "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to force in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (Gifford 177). Joyce appears as the character Stephen Dedalus in this book. Like Joyce, Stephen finds himself in conflict with his family, the Roman Catholic Church, and the nationalistic zeal of the Irish people. Also, like Joyce, Dedalus leaves Ireland and wishes to become a writer (www.jamesjoyce.ie). By depicting Stephen with a mixture of irony and sympathy, Joyce suggests the special importance of the artist in the modern world.

Divided into five chapters, this book follows Stephen's life from childhood through adolescence to manhood. We are essentially given a window into Stephen's consciousness, and the whole world is unveiled to us through that single aperture. According to Sydney Bolt, no novel written before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can match its variety in styles This indicates Joyce's originality. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is told in characteristic dialogue and ironically sympathetic narrative prose (Gifford 151). In this book, the reader encounters a pioneer in modernism as Joyce presents the thoughts, impressions, feelings, and experiences of Stephen Dedalus as he becomes an artist (Gifford 151).

Stephen's artistic development is the central theme of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The name of the hero is full of symbolic significance. Stephen is the name of the first Christian martyr. Symbolism surrounding Dedalus has as double significance for Joyce (www.themodernword.com). The mythical Dedalus was imprisoned in a labyrinth on the island of Crete, and escaped by inventing wings. Dedalus "is a symbol, therefore, not only of the rebel who breaks out of his prison, but of the inventor who creates the instrument of his escape" (www.themodernword.com). Dedalus is both man and artist. In tracing Stephen's growth to young manhood, Joyce mixed conventional realist prose with passages using techniques known as interior monologue and stream of consciousness. These techniques give the reader the illusion of following the character's thoughts (Walsh 149). A Portrait