Works by
James Joyce
(Writer)

Fiction

• Stephen Hero (1944)
  Written 1904-6: precursor to the Portrait, published

• Dubliners (1914)
  Among the most read and studied stories in English literature, these 15 tales offer vivid, tightly focused observations of the lives of Dublin’s poorer classes. At least one, "The Dead," is considered a masterpiece of the form. Taken together, the stories offer an excellent introduction to the work of one of the 20th century’s most influential novelists.

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, providing an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique.
  Movie (1979)  DVD VHS

• Ulysses (1922)
  Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. It was not easy to find a publisher in America willing to take it on, and when Jane Jeap and Margaret Anderson started printing extracts from the book their literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, they were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. They were fined $100, and even The New York Times expressed satisfaction with their conviction. Ulysses was not published in book form until 1922, when another American woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in Paris for her Shakespeare & Company. Ulysses was not available legally in any English-speaking country until 1934, when Random House successfully defended Joyce against obscenity charges and published it in the Modern Library.
  Movie (1967) DVD  VHS

• Finnegans Wake (1939)
  "Experimental novel by James Joyce. Extracts of the work appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, and it was published in its entirety as Finnegans Wake in 1939. The book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod (near Dublin), his wife, and their three children; but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Mrs. Anna Livia Plurabelle, and Kevin, Jerry, and Isabel are every family of mankind. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. Languages merge: Anna Livia has "vlossyhair"--wlosy being Polish for "hair"; "a bad of wind" blows--bad being Persian for "wind." Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear. On another level, the protagonists are the city of Dublin and the River Liffey standing as representatives of the history of Ireland and, by extension, of all human history. As he had in his earlier work Ulysses, Joyce drew upon an encyclopedic range of literary works. His strange polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words is intended to convey not only the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also the interweaving of Irish language and mythology with the languages and mythologies of many other cultures."  -- Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature

Playwriting

• Exiles (1918)
  The only extant play by the great Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941), EXILES is of interest for its autobiographical content. The main character, Richard Rowan, the moody, tormented writer who is at odds with both his wife and the parochial Irish society around him, is clearly a portrait of Joyce himself. The character of Rowan's wife, Bertha, is certainly influenced by Joyce's lover and later wife, Nora Barnacle. And, as in real life, the play depicts the couple with a young son, and Rowan, like Joyce, has returned to Ireland because of his mother's illness and subsequent death. In the largely interior drama focused on the characters' relationships, the undertones of guilt and the longing for freedom mirror themes of the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Long an admirer of Ibsen, Joyce emulated the Scandinavian master in making the central issue of his drama the conflict between individual freedom and a demanding, judgmental society.

  Though one of his lesser-known works, EXILES, written after PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN and while Joyce was working on ULYSSES, provides fascinating insights into the development of the creative gifts of a literary genius.

Poetry

• Chamber Music (1907)

• Pomes Penyeach (1927)

• Dubliners (2000) by James Joyce
  Joyce's classic has been recorded before, of course, but in this new version, each of the 15 stories will be read by a different person, including writers Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt, and Patrick McCabe, and actors Ciaran Hinds and Colm Meaney.