Ulysses

May 1927

Brasch PR6019 O9 U422

Paris: Shakespeare and Company

James Joyce uses classical mythology as a framework for Ulysses. He transposes characters and episodes from Homer’s Odyssey to Dublin on 16 June 1904. Homer’s heroic central characters, Odysseus/Ulysses, Penelope, and Telemachus, become the more ordinary, less heroic Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Homer’s ever-changing Mediterranean setting is replaced by the squalor and monotony of modern Dublin. While writing the novel, Joyce gave the chapters classical titles (Nestor, Proteus, Cyclops, etc.), but he cut these before the text was published.