Book Collecting Guides

James Joyce – First Edition Books: Identification Guide

James Joyce
James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce ( 1882 – 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernistavant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism.

On 7 January 1904, Joyce attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected by the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his 22nd birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called Stephen Hero. It was a fictional rendering of Joyce’s youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this work. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce completely rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The unfinished Stephen Hero was published after his death.

James Joyce‘s first major work, Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by Joyce, first published in 1914, by Grant Richards Ltd. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by converging ideas and influences. The stories centre on Joyce’s idea of an epiphany: a moment when a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists. Subsequent stories deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This aligns with Joyce’s tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.

As he was completing work on Dubliners in 1906, Joyce considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses. Although he did not pursue the idea further at the time, he eventually commenced work on a novel using both the title and basic premise in 1914. The writing was completed in October 1921. Joyce found getting a publisher to accept the book to be difficult, due to accusations of obscenity, but it was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach from her well-known Rive Gauche bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. An English edition published the same year by Joyce’s patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, ran into further difficulties with the United States authorities, and 500 copies that were shipped to the States were seized and possibly destroyed.

James Joyce’s work has been an important influence on writers and scholars such as Samuel Beckett, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O’Brien, Salman Rushdie, Robert Anton Wilson, John Updike, David Lodge, Cormac McCarthy and Joseph Campbell. Ulysses has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire Modernist movement” and Joyce has been said to have “unquestionable and colossal” influence on European Modernism. The Bulgarian-French literary theorist Julia Kristeva characterised Joyce’s novel writing as “polyphonic” and a hallmark of postmodernity alongside the poets Mallarmé and Rimbaud.

James Joyce – First Editions Identification Guide

James Joyce – First Printing Dust Jackets Identification Guide

Gallery of First state Dust Jackets of ‘s works. Only includes the first appearance in book form. Either the UK or US edition and does not include later printings.

Reference:

  • Wikipedia
  • John J. Slocum & Herbert Cahoon: A Bibliography of James Joyce