Ulysses is a modern novel by Irish writer John Joyce, which was first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920., and the entire book was published by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 2022. According to Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.  Ulysses chronicles the appointments and encounters of the itinerant Leopold Bloom in Dublin  in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904/  Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey and the novel establishes and experiences of Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope and Stehen Dedalus and Telemachus. The novel is highly allusive and its prose imitates the styles of different periods of English literature.

The novel’s stream of consciousness technique, careful structuring and experimental prose replete with puns, parodies and allusions with its rich characterisation and broad humour have led it to be regarded as one of the greatest literary works in history.

John Joyce  had been a raised as a Catholic but not as a bilingual speaker of Irish and English. His parents were English speakers. The city where he lived was English-speaking and his education had always been conducted in English, first with the Jesuits and then as an undergraduate at University College, Dublin. He was taking classes in Irish, and his interest having been sparked  by the Irish Literacy Revival, a movement spearheaded by intellectuals and academics from both Ireland and England, from Protestantism and Catholicism, among them W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, and Maud Gonne MacBride.

On Sunday March 31, 1901, John Joyce wrote in near, cursive script, and filled out the form on census  night in Dublin. He recorded his name and age, and those of his wife and the ten Joyce children who lived at 16, Royal Terrace, Fairview. He listed his son James as nineteen-year-old, Male Roman Catholic, unmarried, a student and a speaker of Irish and English.

In Trieste, Zurich and Paris he found himself immersed in other languages, their variety fascinating and delighting him. He already knew French, and he also took lessons in Italian, German,.

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