Ulysses.

"As you are now so once were we": First English Edition Of Ulysses, One of 2,000 Copies

Ulysses.

JOYCE, James.

Item Number: 86742

London: For the Egoist Press by John Rodker, 1922.

The first English edition of Joyce’s masterpiece. Quarto, original printed wrappers. One of 2000 numbered copies. This edition was printed by Darantiere from the first edition plates as soon as that edition was exhausted. It was printed for Joyce’s patron Harriet Weaver, who was unable to find a printer in England, and distributed mainly by Rodker and Ezra Pound, working from Paris. According to Slocum & Cahoon, of the 2000 copies of Ulysses from the first edition plates, approximately 500 were sent to America and subsequently burned by government censorship authorities. A very good unrestored example. Housed in a custom morocco clamshell and chemise box.

Ulysses was published in Paris by Shakespeare & Company, 1922. It was a struggle for the author to find a publisher, a comic irony considering that Ulysses is "[u]niversally hailed as the most influential work of modern times" (Grolier Joyce 69). Ulysses was an immediate success. The first printing sold out, and "within a year Joyce had become a well-known literary figure. Ulysses was explosive in its impact on the literary world of 1922" (de Grazia, 27). Even so, the book faced difficulties in global reception. It was banned in the U.K. and was prosecuted for the obscenity in the Nausicaa episode (Ellmann, 1982). Joyce's inspiration for the novel began as a young boy reading Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses and writing an essay entitled "My Favourite Hero" after being impressed by the wholeness of the character (Goreman, 1939). The idea for the novel grew from a story in Dubliners in 1906, which Joyce expanded into a short book in 1907, before reconceptualizing it as the heady novel in 1914 (Ellmann, 1982). The book can initially seem unsctructured and chaotic, and Joyce admitted that he "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant" (The Observer, 2000). The French translator Stuart Gilbert published a defense of Ulysses shortly after its publication in which he supported the novel's use of obscenity and explained its internal structure and links to the Odyssey against accusations of ambiguity. Every episode, Gilbert explained, is connected to the Odyssey by theme, technique, and correspondence between characters. Another instance of Ulysses' literary contribution is his use of stream-of-consciousness, a technique employing carefully structured prose, both humorous and charactering, and involving puns and parodies. Joyce was a precursor to the use of stream of consciousness in the later decades. Similar narrative techniques were used by his contemporaries Virginia Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Italo Svevo. Their style can be better characterized as an "interior monologue, rather than stream of consciousness, is the appropriate term for the style in which [subjective experience] is recorded, both in The Waves and in Woolf's writing generally" (Stevenson, 1992).

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