Penguin Modern Classics: Ulysses

For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 to 1921, it has survived bowdlerisation, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishing wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction Ulysses is 'An endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.' This edition is the standard Random House/Bodley Head text that first appeared in 1960. 'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century.' Anthony Burgess