James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in 1922, just over two weeks after the British handed over the keys of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins and his new Irish government. The other great literary event of that year was TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Joyce’s novel had much in common with Eliot’s long poem — it dealt with the rawness of urban life using competing narrative forms, including pastiche and myth and different kinds of voices. The Waste Land sounded a sort of death knell for the narrative poem, just as Ulysses set about killing off the single-perspective, the all-knowing authorial voice — firing the starting gun for a wave of “modernist” writing, from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett, that comprehensively rewrote the rules as to how literature was approached and presented.
Ulysses, now celebrating its centenary, has grown in importance over the past 100 years, during which it has repeatedly been declared one of — if not the — greatest novels of the 20th century.