Synopses & Reviews
Declan Kiberd, professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin and Ireland"s premier literary historian, offers an audacious, pioneering new take on James Joyce"s masterpiece. Ulysses, he argues, is not an esoteric work for the scholarly few but indisputably a work rooted in the lives of ordinary citizens, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world.
Structuring his analysis around the mundane pleasures highlighted throughout the work'"including waking, walking, and drinking'"Kiberd progresses through each of Ulysses"s episodes to elegantly reveal that Joyce"s ultimate goal was to create a book honoring the richness of daily life. At a time when most other modernist authors adopted a rather dismissive tone toward popular culture and the emerging noise of industry, Joyce wrote Ulyssesto extol the everyday man and embrace the bustle of middle-class streets. He wanted to infuse that commonplace Dublin world, in all of its grit and vulgar physicality, with a fierce passion and a miraculous interiority that would illuminate its underlying beauty.
For Kiberd, the seemingly banal hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom and, in this way, offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante, and the Bible'"all of which Joyce drew on in writing his book. By shedding light on Joyce"s celebration of everyday life, Kiberd rescues Ulyssesfrom the dusty shelves of rarified literary neglect and presents it to the audience it was originally written about and for which it was intended.
Review
"Kiberd's book--lucid, learned, free of jargon and pretension--can make for a wonderful companion along the journey through Joyce's wondrous epic." Sudip Bose
Review
"[Kiberd is] one of our liveliest and most iconoclastic intellectuals. . . . Whether or not is an example of wisdom literature, s certainly is." American Scholar
Synopsis
Declan Kiberd, a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin, offers an audacious new take on Joyce's classic novel. , he argues, is a work written for and about the common person, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world. In this passionate corrective to the widespread view of as an esoteric tome for the scholarly few, Kiberd dispells the aura of academic mystique that has attached itself to the novel, opening our eyes to as a celebration of the everyday and a model for living well in an unpredictable world.
Synopsis
'A feast. This book will reach and move many ordinary and extraordinary readers."Edna O"Brien
'The most exciting book I know on the most exciting novel ever written. Declan Kiberd"s brilliantly informed and highly entertaining advocacy liberates Joyce"s greatest book from the dungeon of unreadable masterpieces and restores it to being what its maker intended: a treasury of joys, a guide to enlightened living. Ulysses, finally, is a book about a friendship between a sometimes difficult young genius and a man made wise by life. No novel ever had a more understanding friend than Declan Kiberd."Joseph O"Connor, author of Redemption Fallsand Star of the Sea
Synopsis
Why James Joyce's great modernist masterpiece is in fact a book that can teach ordinary people to live better lives.
About the Author
Declan Kiberd is a professor of Anglo-Irish literature at the University College Dublin and the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which won the Irish Times Prize, and of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece. He lives in Dublin.