Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius)

Irish writer. His originality lies in evolving a literary form to express the complexity of the human mind, and he revolutionized the form of the English novel with his linguistic technique which had a far-reaching influence on many modern authors. His works include the short story collection Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Ulysses, which records the events of a single day in Dublin, experiments with language and parody, imitating and sometimes mocking different styles of writing. It combines direct narrative with the unspoken and unconscious reactions of the characters, which is sometimes known as the stream of consciousness technique. Banned at first for obscenity in the USA and the UK, it made a great impact and is generally regarded as Joyce's masterpiece. He is known as a major figure in the artistic movement of modernism.

Joyce was born in Dublin, one of a large and poor family, and educated at University College, Dublin. He showed strong literary tendencies very early in life and after graduating wrote a few stories but was unable to make a living. He travelled to Italy, where he taught English, accompanied by Nora Barnacle (1883–1951; his wife from 1931). In 1909 he returned to Dublin. Until this point, Joyce's only published work was a book of lyrics called Chamber Music (1907); his other verse appeared in Pomes Penyeach (1927). Dubliners was published after a nine-year delay caused by wrangling with publishers over their demands for excisions, while the partly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist (1914–15). At this time Joyce was under ‘free arrest’ in Austria, but was later allowed to go to neutral Switzerland where he lived in Zürich until the end of World War I. There he formed a company of Irish players who performed his drama Exiles (1918), modelled on Ibsen's work. In Zürich, Joyce's eyesight began to fail, and a few years after the war he moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. Finnegans Wake, a story about a Dublin publican and his family, continued Joyce's experiments with language. Having worked in poverty for much of his life, and after enduring numerous eye operations, Joyce returned to Zürich in 1940, but died soon afterwards.