Ulysses and Us
The Art of Everyday Living
Published on 3. June 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
416 pages
978-0-571-24255-9 (ISBN)
Description
In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. As much a guide to contemporary life as it is virtuoso work of literary criticism, Ulysses and Us offers revolutionary insights to the scholar and the first-time reader alike.
Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible.
'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor
Leopold Bloom, the half-Jewish Irishman who is the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses, teaches the young Stephen Dedalus (modelled on Joyce himself) how he can grow and mature as an artist and an adult human being. Bloom has learned to live with contradictions, with anxiety and sexual jealousy, and with the rudeness and racism of the people he encounters in the city streets, and in his apparently banal way sees deeper than any of them. He embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom, Kiberd argues, and in this way offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of the literature upon which Joyce drew in writing Ulysses, such as Homer, Dante and the Bible.
'Declan Kiberd's brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce's greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces.' Joseph O'Connor
More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
325 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-571-24255-9 (9780571242559)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
06/2010
Faber & Faber
€11.99
Available for download
Person
Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize in 1995. It is one of the most influential works on Irish culture published in the last twenty years. His Irish Classics came out in 2000 and won the prestigious Lannan Prize in the USA. He is the Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, and has written and edited numerous important scholarly works, including The Student's Annotated Ulysses (1992). Declan Kiberd is a widely respected broadcaster, critic and reviewer.