ABSTRACT
J ames Joyce's Ulysses is arguably the most commented upon, most admired, and most reviled novel in any language to have been published in the 20th century.
In many ways, Ulysses is very much a work of its time-in part because it is an unrepeatable, self-consciously epoch-making performance. It is a principal text of high modernism alongside, for example, Ezra Pound's Cantos (1925), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (also published in 1922), and the novels of Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. Ulysses is a modernist text in its fragmented, complicated, at times aggressively difficult stylealthough it remains broadly intelligible to new readers in a way that Joyce's later Finnegans Wake (1939) does not-and it is modernist, too, in its comprehensive engagement with the world of the early 20th century, from the rising power of commercial advertising to the newly unstable and multilayered sense of the human mind propagated by Freudian psychoanalysis.
