Today marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, by Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company. It’s also James Joyce’s birthday; he was born on 2 February 1882 – 140 years ago.
Ulysses is contemporary with the Irish Free State, established on 6 December 1922; historians love to pore over its dense, riddling text for clues about the national psyche at the time. The novel and the year have come to be seen as key turning points in Modernism; TS Eliot, whose The Waste Land appeared in December 1922, called Ulysses “a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape”.
