He was born in Dublin, on 2nd February 1882; he had got a good education at Jesuit school and University College in Dublin. He read widely developing a particular interest in Yeats and Dante as well as in the great contemporary dramatist Ibsen. He loved his country, Ireland, but did not agree with the nationalist movements. He lived in Trieste and Rome, but he moved to Zurich during the first world war. In Trieste he met Italo Svevo and he became a friend of him. After he went to Paris, but he died in Zurich in 1941.

Joyce believed that the job of the artist was not to convince, but to make people see. He adopted some innovations in narrative technique: different narrative voices; different point of view; different linguistic styles; extensive use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness; Joyce’s main themes are the human condition and the subjectivity of experience. They also have an autobiographical dimension.

the " interior monologue " (also referred to as "Stream of consciousness ") is a narrative tecnique whereby the character's thoughts, impressions, and emotions are presented as they spring up in the mind, often without logical sequence. Joyce abolished the narrator’s presence; use of third person; the total absence of punctuation, question marks and verbs like “to say, to tell, to think...” a large use of contrast, paradoxes, false clues and symbols which are usually connected to the real things.

Joyce thought that the artist ought to be "invisible" in his works, in the sense that he must not express his own viewpoint. He should instead try to express the thoughts and experiences of other men. He advocated the total objectivity of the artist and his independence from all moral, religious or political pressures.

Edited in 1939, it is Joyce’s last work. The title came from the popular Irish ballad about a hod carrier called Finnegan who falls to a supposed death from a building but is revived by a skite of whisky which is thrown in the drunken melee that ensues at his wake. The novel is divided into four main parts called “books”. The main characters : H. C. Earwicker, an innkeeper ; Ann, his wife; Isobel, Kevin e Jerry, their sons; It is set in one night in Dublin and is who life story turns out to all mankind. It is the story of an innkeeper that is half asleep in a drunken stupor and memories float across his mind. No syntax survives and the vocabulary is partly invented, partly English and partly taken from at least twelve different European languages and dialects. Time, sequence, structure and narration have disappeared in this novel.

At the end of a Saturdany night, Earwicker went to bed a bit drunk. At first he dreams of what he has done during the day, then, he falls in a deep sleep, oppressed by a all night long. He sleeps together with his wife, but he isn’t attracted by her as a woman. He thinks about his childrenbut in his mind the feeling of love he used to feel for his wife is confused with the erotic feeling of attraction that he now feels for his daughter. At the same time, love for his favourite son is becoming a homosexual sentiment. Kevin is a quiet boy and he is probably destined to becoming a Catholic priest. Jerry has a special talent in poetry and therefore his father identifies himself with the boy. We know that his erotic fantasies and horrors of remorse in his dreams take inspiration by the feelings that Earweaker feels for his children.

His main works are:  Dubliners;  A Finnegan’s Wake;  A Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man;  Ulysses;

It is considered the masterpiece of whole Joyce’s literary production. It sets in Dublin on a single day- June 16th and all the story is based on only three characters: Leopold Bloom as Ulysses Stephen Dedalus as Telemachus Molly Bloom who is nicknamed Penelope

It is divided into three sections : the first one is Telemachia, that deals with the adventure of Stephen Dedalus; the second called Odyssey is about the characters of Ulysses; the last one is called Nostos and deals with Leopold’s return home and Molly.  The plot is built only around the relation between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. They are indispensable to each other because Leopold Bloom is anxiously looking for the son who he had missed and Stephen is momentarily in search of a paternal figure. This relationship between this two characters isn’t so simple, in fact Stephen and Leopold are also two representatives of two different world, two different mentalities: Leopold is the citizen, a common person, whereas Stephen is the artist who has chosen the “exile” for his reasons.  Menù