BACKGROUND INFORMATION - BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce was born in Raltgar, Dublin on February 2, 1882. He was educated at the Jesuit schools Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College and at the University College, Dublin. A good linguist, from an early age he read and wrote widely. In 1901, he wrote a letter of profound admiration in Dano- Norwegian to Ibsen. Other early influences included Hauptmann, Dante, G. Moore and Yeats. Dissatisfied with the narrowness and bigotry of Irish Catholicism, Joyce went to Paris for a year in 1902. There he lived in poverty, wrote poetry and discovered DujardinÂ’s novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupes. This was to be the source of his own use of interior monologue. He returned to Dublin when his mother was at her deathbed. He stayed briefly in the Martello tower of Ulysses with Gogarty. Then he left Ireland for good with Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he spent the rest of his life. She bore him a son and a daughter. They lived at Trieste for some years. There Joyce taught English at the Berlitz School. They moved in 1915 to Zurich.

His famous novel Ulysses was published on 2 February 1922, his 40 ^th birthday. Another small volume of verse, Pomes Penyeach appeared in 1927. His second great work Finnegans Wake was published in 1939. This work revolutionized the form and structure of the novel. It decisively influenced the development of the "stream of consciousness" or "interior monologue." Joyce died in 1941.

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