James Joyce

1882-1941. Novelist.

His Life, Family and education:

James Augustine Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and died at the age of 59 in 1941. He had three brothers and six sisters. Joyce came from a lower middle-class family which often had financial difficulties. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle who bore him a son and a daughter and who he maried in 1931. From 1888 to 1893 he visited Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boy's school and later on he went to Belvedere College, another Jesuit boy's day-school. In the following years Joyce studied several subjects at Royal University in Dublin and in 1902 he had a short enrolment at the Royal University Medical School.

His Faith:

James Joyce was a Catholic, but his faith dwindled in the course of this life. In the year 1889 he became an altar boy an in 1895 he entered the Solidarity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But after his death he was buried without the last rites of the Catholic Church.

His Literary Interests:

James Joyce wrote and published several provocative papers and also reviewed plays by Ibsen, a contemporary Norwegian dramatist. Joyce was in contact with the most important poets of that time: W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He also formed a theatre group and won academic prizes for his papers in 1894 and 1897.

His Works:

Chamber Music (volume of poems) (1907), Dubliners (collection of short stories) ( 1914) , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (novel; fictional autobiography) (1914/1915), Exiles (play) (1918) , Ulysses (novel) (1922) , Finnegans Wake (novel) (1939)

Sources:

Attridge, Derek . The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Birch, Dinah. The Oxford Companion to English Literature.Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009.

Connor, Steven. James Joyce, Plymouth: Northcote House. 1996.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008.