Trinity Joyce Scholar Edits Groundbreaking New Edition of Ulysses
Posted on: 01 November 2012
Dr Sam Slote, Associate Professor in Trinity’s School of English, has just launched the Alma Classics edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The new volume reprints the 1939 Odyssey Press edition and includes over 9,000 all-new annotations, representing the latest in Joyce scholarship and covering the full range of references in Joyce’s work.
Dr Slote’s edition is aimed at all levels of interest, from the casual reader to scholars working on the complex strata of allusions in Ulysses. Launching the book at the James Joyce Centre, Ann Fogarty, Professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin and Director of the UCD James Joyce Research Centre praised Dr Slote’s deft negotiation of information and interpretation in the new volume. The Alma Classics edition would now stand, she suggested, at a point of evolution in the field and as a core presence within Joycean textual studies.
Ulysses is undoubtedly a landmark of twentieth century Modernism. It charts one day – 16th June 1904 – in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin: the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, the artist Stephen Dedalus and Bloom’s wife Molly. Their thoughts and encounters form the basis of the narrative, which becomes a celebration of all human experience through the lives of specific individuals in a specific place at a specific time. Ulysses is both an experimental novel and a book intimately concerned with the events of modern life.