James Joyce’s Ulysses

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.

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Guests

• Steven Connor 4 episodes
  Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of London
• Jeri Johnson 2 episodes
  Senior Fellow in English at Exeter College, Oxford
• Richard Brown No other episodes
  Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Leeds

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Programme ID: b01jrldv

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jrldv

Auto-category: 823.912 (English fiction–20th century)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In a celebrated case brought before the District Court of New York in December 1932, Judge John Woolsey was asked to decide whether James Joyce's novel Ulysses was obscene.