Joyce wrote as a kind of archaeologist: Ulysses, Henri Lefebvre wrote, marked ‘the momentous eruption of everyday life into literature’, in which Joyce’s sprawling prose ‘rescues, one after the other, each facet of the quotidian from anonymity’. Famously, Joyce even risked censorship in order to drag into view details about the career of the human body that other novelists had ignored. This chapter analyzes Joyce’s engagement with the everyday by focusing on scenes of mourning, when the everyday suddenly becomes at once visible and painfully fragile. These moments – funerals, wakes, and death rites – constitute a steady yet largely unexamined through-line running from Joyce’s first story to his last novel. Death itself is at once the most common and the most shocking of experiences, an event that rends the fabric of our everyday life as we try to readjust our habits around an often abrupt and painful absence. Seen this way, Joyce’s works become not only archaeological digs into the ever-vanishing everyday but also documents of human and cultural resilience amid the fury of modernity.

This chapter surveys the centrality of sex and sexuality to Joyce’s modernist experiment. Representing sexuality was vital to Joyce’s creative method because it demanded strategies that would define his prose: ambiguity, ellipsis, opacity, and obscurity. Gaps and silences marked the emergence of an inchoate modernism that characterized Joyce’s writing about sex – the subject of his fiction where form and content were most intimately entangled. A self-consciously radical frankness was essential to his commitment to innovation of subject and style, as he sought to define his creative practice against the ‘prudery’ of an imagined Victorianism. Sexual daring became an important aspect of his success in establishing himself at the heart of experimental international modernism, through little magazines and coterie publishing houses.

This chapter traces the emergence of Joyce’s aesthetic from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, analyzing the development of Stephen Dedalus as would-be artist in the context of Irish colonial experience. It pays particular attention to the influence of Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde’s Picture of Doran Gray and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist belong to the Bildungsroman tradition, that is, to the novel of development, which their narratives challenge and transform by presenting the central character’s growth to maturity as deviating from cultural expectations rather than fulfilling them. Joyce’s narrative, however, points toward a new nation’s emergence.

The story of how Joyce moved from an apparently unassuming strain of naturalism in his early fiction to the kaleidoscopic deconstruction of language and form in his final work, is one of the great arcs of world literature. Joyce produced landmark publications that would disrupt and re-imagine the writing of fiction across the globe, while remaining centered on the social conditions of early twentieth-century Dublin. His achievement is staggering: he re-wrote the terms of engagement for modern short fiction, the Bildungsroman, and the novel; he made a critical intervention in the Irish Literary Revival and became a touchstone of modernism; he invented new modes of naturalism and narration; he re-mapped classical and mythical influence on literary form; and, finally, he created his own riotous subversion of the English language. Associated with the heyday of European modernism, rooted in Irish history and culture, engaging in anti-imperial politics, with frank and challenging depictions of bodies and sex, Joyce’s oeuvre, despite censorship and snubbing, has had colossal influence over the past century and more.