logo
episode-header-image
Jun 2012
42m 5s

James Joyce's Ulysses

Bbc Radio 4
About this episode

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss James Joyce's novel Ulysses. First published ninety years ago in Paris, Joyce's masterpiece is a sprawling and startlingly original work charting a single day in the life of the Dubliner Leopold Bloom. Some early readers were outraged by its sexual content and daringly scatalogical humour, and the novel was banned in most English-speaking countries for a decade after it first appeared. But it was soon recognised as a genuinely innovative work: overturning the ban on its publication, an American judge described Ulysses as "a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind."Today Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest example of literary modernism, and a work that changed literature forever. It remains one of the most discussed novels ever written.Steven ConnorProfessor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of LondonJeri JohnsonSenior Fellow in English at Exeter College, OxfordRichard BrownReader in Modern English Literature at the University of LeedsProducer: Thomas Morris.

Up next
Yesterday
Archive: Erasmus
One of the most celebrated thinkers of the Renaissance, Erasmus (c1466-1536) is best known for his works of classical and religious scholarship, and for his infamous theological dispute with Martin Luther (1483-1546) over free will and the Church. In this archive episode, first r ... Show More
42m 49s
Oct 15
Thomas More's Utopia
In 1516, the publication of one small book would coin a new word and give rise to centuries of literature, theory, and thought. In his most influential work, the lawyer and Tudor politician Thomas More (1478-1535) described a seemingly perfect – but entirely fictional – island ca ... Show More
54m 52s
Oct 12
Archive: The Measurement of Time
Misha Glenny chooses the first of his archive picks - bringing back classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, every Monday. Humans have tried to calculate, regulate, and measure time for thousands of years: from systems based on tracking sunrise and sunset, to the inven ... Show More
42m 59s
Recommended Episodes
Jun 2022
James Joyce and Ulysses
This year is the 100th anniversary of Ulysses by James Joyce, a landmark modernist novel and one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Ulysses is the story of one day in the life of a young Irishman in Dublin; that day, June the 16th, is now known as Bloomsday. To ma ... Show More
8m 58s
Nov 2023
Oh Man, James Joyce was a Dirty Dude!
James Joyce is, without question, one of the most famous authors in the English language. Millions of readers have enjoyed (and sometimes struggled with) his groundbreaking novels and short stories. However... that's not all Joyce wrote. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max expl ... Show More
42m 11s
Sep 2023
Fact-Checking ‘Ulysses’
Armed with Thom’s Directory, James Joyce strove to recreate 1904 Dublin as accurately as possible, down to the last solicitor and street railing. But, as Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, the novel is pockmarked with errors, only some intentional. Colm joins Tom to discuss ... Show More
45m 44s
Aug 2023
The Long and Short: James Joyce's Dubliners
James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In the ... Show More
11m 9s
Jun 2016
Literary Pursuits: Dubliners
Sarah Dillon on James Joyce's epic struggle to publish his first book, Dubliners. 
43m 29s
Dec 2017
122 Young James Joyce
We often think of James Joyce as a man in his thirties and forties, a monkish, fanatical, eyepatch-wearing author, trapped in his hovel and his own mind, agonizing over his masterpieces, sentence by sentence, word by laborious word. But young James Joyce, the one who studied lite ... Show More
1h 4m