James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue, use of a complex network of symbolic parallels, and invented words, puns, and allusions in his novels.
On 2 February 1882, Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland. Joyce's father was John Stanislaus Joyce and his mother was Mary Jane "May" (née Murray). He was the eldest of 10 surviving siblings; two died of typhoid. James was baptised according to the rites of the Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church in Terenure on 5 February 1882 by Rev. John O'Mulloy. Joyce's godparents were Philip and Ellen McCann.
John Stanislaus Joyce's family came from Fermoy in County Cork; they had owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's paternal grandfather, James Augustine Joyce, married Ellen O'Connell, daughter of John O'Connell, a Cork alderman who owned a drapery business and other properties in Cork City. Ellen's family claimed kinship with Daniel O'Connell, "The Liberator". The Joyce family's purported ancestor, Seán Mór Seoighe (fl. 1680) was a stonemason from Connemara.
In 1887, his father was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray, 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Around this time, Joyce was attacked by a dog, leading to his lifelong cynophobia. He suffered from astraphobia; a superstitious aunt had described thunderstorms as a sign of God's wrath.
In 1891, Joyce wrote a poem on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic Church, the Irish Home Rule Party, and the British Liberal Party and the resulting collaborative failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The Irish Party had dropped Parnell from leadership, but the Vatican's role in allying with the British Conservative Party to prevent home rule left a lasting impression on the young Joyce. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even sent a part to the Vatican Library. In November, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs' Gazette (a publisher of bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893, John Joyce was dismissed with a pension, beginning the family's slide into poverty caused mainly by his drinking and financial mismanagement.
Joyce had begun his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, in 1888, but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893. This came about because of a chance meeting his father had with a Jesuit priest called John Conmee, who knew the family, and Joyce was given a reduction in fees to attend Belvedere. In 1895, Joyce, now aged 13, was elected to join the Sodality of Our Lady by his peers at Belvedere.[10] The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas continued to have a strong influence on him for most of his life.
oyce enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin (UCD) in 1898, studying English, French, and Italian. He became active in theatrical and literary circles in the city. In 1900, his laudatory review of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken was published in The Fortnightly Review; it was his first publication, and after learning basic Norwegian to send a fan letter to Ibsen, he received a letter of thanks from the dramatist. Joyce wrote a number of other articles and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the friends he made at UCD appeared as characters in Joyce's works. His closest colleagues included leading figures of the generation, most notably, Tom Kettle, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Joyce was first introduced to the Irish public by Arthur Griffith in his newspaper, United Irishman, in November 1901. Joyce had written an article on the Irish Literary Theatre, and his college magazine refused to print it. Joyce had it printed and distributed locally. Griffith himself wrote a piece decrying the censorship of the student James Joyce. In 1901, the National Census of Ireland lists James Joyce as an English- and Irish-speaking scholar living with his mother and father, six sisters, and three brothers at Royal Terrace (now Inverness Road), Clontarf, Dublin.
After graduating from UCD in 1902, Joyce left for Paris to study medicine, but he soon abandoned this. Joyce returned to Ireland. Fearing for her son's impiety, his mother tried unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his confession and to take communion. She finally passed into a coma and died on 13 August, James and his brother Stanislaus having refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside.After her death, he continued to drink heavily and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped together a living reviewing books, teaching, and singing; he was an accomplished tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis Ceoil.
On 11 January 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zürich for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He fell into a coma the following day. He awoke at 2 am on 13 January 1941, and asked a nurse to call his wife and son, before losing consciousness again. They were en route when he died 15 minutes later. Joyce was less than a month short of his 59th birthday.
James Joyce is a Modernist. His style includes experimentation with structure, dialogue and characterization. Joyce’s novels, with their innovative language, use of dialogue, characteristic modernist forms, and social frankness, met with resistance when they first appeared in print. For instance, in A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist, vignettes of critical life events form the structure thus rendering the narrative void of a conventional beginning, middle and end.
Some of his famous works
Finnegans Wake (1939)
Ulysses (1922)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
The dead (1914)
Read his books :
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1039
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