The Irish born writer (1882-1941), who ended up in self-imposed exile, an ambivalent state of mind which he sometimes revelled in, as much as one of geographical displacement, is one of the most influential writers known to literature, and is renowned for his novelistic innovation and as a towering figure in literary Modernism. To highlight his achievement it suffices to mention his novel Ulysses, published in 1922. This complex and challenging work, which is at the same time warm and humorous, has had a massive influence on literature ever since, both in terms of style and subject matter, and has been cited by many as the greatest novel ever written. Over the space of more than 600 pages, it deals in intimate detail and in innovative ways with a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, its main protagonist, who lives in Dublin, also the city of Joyce’s birth. A city which in many ways possessed Joyce, in that he hardly wrote about anything else, despite the fact that he spent the majority of his adult life living elsewhere, notably in Paris and the Italian town of Trieste. Joyce is also the author of The Dubliners (1914) (a collection of short stories, though such a weak description hardly does justice to its monumental achievement), and two other novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939). The first was a ground breaking work which was initially much misunderstood, and Joyce was driven to despair by criticisms of it, saying that people tended to ignore the ‘young’ in the title, whilst his last novel has intrigued and inspired such notable scholars and philosophers as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Andrew Norris.