Ulysses

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1922, which transposes the events of Homer's Odyssey onto a single day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, following the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and the young writer Stephen Dedalus as their paths intersect across the city. Each of the novel's eighteen episodes corresponds loosely to an episode of Homer's epic and is written in a distinct style, ranging from interior stream of consciousness to dramatic script, catechism and parody of English prose styles through history, culminating in Molly Bloom's unpunctuated closing soliloquy. Serialized in the American journal The Little Review before its 1922 Paris book publication by Sylvia Beach, the novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United States and banned there until a landmark 1933 court ruling permitted its publication. Widely regarded as one of the most important works of modernist literature for its formal innovation, its minute rendering of ordinary consciousness and its encyclopedic ambition, Ulysses is frequently named among the greatest novels written in English.