James Joyce (1882-1941) was born into a Catholic family in Dublin. When he was young, his family was quite well-off; but gradually it became impoverished. Joyce got his education at Catholic schools where he received very strict religious training. During his school days, Joyce passed through a phase of religious enthusiasm; but he finally rejected the Catholic Church and started a rebellion against the narrowness and bigotry of the bourgeois philistines in Dublin. When he studied modern languages at Dublin's University-College, he read a lot of books forbidden by the Catholic Church. Influenced by Ibsen, Joyce finally decided to take the literary mission as his career. He refused to take any part in the nationalist activities of his fellow students. After his graduation, Joyce left Ireland for the continent. He lived and worked in France, Italy and Switzerland for the rest of his life except a few brief trips back to Ireland; for Joyce regarded exile as the only way to serve his integrity and to enable him to recreate the life in Dublin truthfully, completely and objectively in his writings.

Joyce is not a commercial writer. In his lifetime, he wrote altogether three novels, a collection of short stories, two volumes of poetry, and one play. The novels and short stories are regarded as his great works, all of which have the same setting: Ireland, especially Dublin, and the same subject: the Irish people and their life.

Dubliners (1914), a collection of 15 short stories, is the first important work of Joyce's lifelong occupation with Dublin life. The stories have an artistic unity given by Joyce who intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of my country ... under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life." The first three stories proceed roughly through childhood and adolescence in a kind of autobiography; the  seven are about people in their maturity; and the last four deal with public life. The stories progress from simple to complex. Each story sents an aspect of  "dear dirty Dublin," an aspect of the city's paralysis -- moral, political, or spiritual. Each story is an action, defining a frustration or defeat of the soul. And the whole sequence of the stories resents the entire course of moral deterioration in Dublin, ending in the death of the soul. Dubliners begins by senting death as an inscrutable fact in a small boy's existence; it ends with a vision in which death is seen. To make the Irish see death and living dead in their life is perhaps the first step, in Joyce's opinion, to evoke the national spirit of the Irish people. The stories are also important as examples of Joyce's theory of epiphany in fiction; each is concerned with a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident.

In 1916, Joyce published his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The  of the novel suggests a character study with strong autobiographical elements. The novel can be read as a naturalistic account of the hero's bitter experiences and his final artistic and spiritual liberation. The story develops around the life of a middle-class Irish boy, Stephen Dedalus, from his infancy to his departure from Ireland some twenty years later. Stephen has an unhappy boyhood. At school, he is unfairly treated by his schoolmates and his masters. During his adolescence the sensitive boy gradually becomes conscious of the opssive ssures from the moral, political and spiritual environment. He starts to rebel against the opssive ssures. But rebellion would only result in frustrations. Thus, he turns to seek sensual pleasure as an outlet. Consequently he is tormented with his sense of moral sin and frightened by the terrors of the Last Judgment. To remove the restless agony from his mind, he devotes himself to religion; but finally he is repelled by the chilly church life and rejects the call to the priesthood. At a moment of revelation on the seashore, Stephen suddenly realizes that the artistic vocation is his true mission. To fulfill this mission, Stephen decides to leave Ireland, to cast off all those that try to tie him down -- "his family, his religion, his country and his fleshly desire."

Ulysses (1922), Joyce's masterpiece, has become a prime example of modernism in literature. It is such an uncommon novel that there arises the question whether it can be termed as a "novel" at all; for it seems to lack almost all the essential qualities of the novel in a traditional sense: there is virtually no story, no plot, almost no action, and little characterization in the usual sense. Broadly speaking, Ulysses gives an account of man's life during one day (16 June, 1904) in Dublin. The three major characters are- Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, his wife, Marion Tweedy Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The whole novel is spanided into I8 episodes in correspondence with the 18 hours of the day. The first three episodes are mainly concerned with Stephen Dedalus: be gets up at 8 o'clock on this specific day; he teaches a history class at a boy's school; and then he walks along the strand to town with random thoughts in mind. The  14 episodes are largely about Leopold Bloom, who, after breakfast, goes about Dublin on his day's routine activities. In the morning, Bloom takes a Turkish bath, calls in at the National Library, attends the funeral of a friend, and shows up at the newspaper office where he sells advertising. After lunch, Bloom wanders about in the city, meeting people in streets, at pubs and in shops, worrying about his wife, his money, his daughter and his digestion, pursuing persistently his own ruminations over his past, the death of his father and his baby son, but at the same time cocking an alert ear for what is going on around him. Then he roams along a beach at twilight, sitting at a place to watch an unknown girl and having a day dream. In the evening he visits a maternity hospital to inquire about the birth of a friend's baby. During the course of the day, Stephen also wanders aimlessly in the town, propounding his theory on Shakespeare's Hamlet at the National Library, drinking at the students' common room of the hospital, visiting a brothel in the "Nighttown" where he is rescued in a drunken affray by Bloom. Subsequently Bloom invites Stephen back to his home for a late drink. Stephen leaves in the early hours of the morning and Bloom goes to bed. The novel ends with the famous monologue by Molly, who is musing in a half-awake state over her past experiences as a woman. The events of the day seem to be trivial, insignificant, or even banal. But below the surface of the events, the natural flow of mental reflections, the shifting moods and impulses in the characters' inner world are richly sented in an uncedentedly frank and penetrating way.

In Ulysses, Joyce intends to sent a microcosm of the whole human life by providing an instance of how a single event contains all the events of its kind, and how history is recapitulated in the happenings of one day. With complete objectivity and minute details of man's everyday routines and his psychic processes, Joyce illustrates a symbolic picture of all human history, which is simultaneously tragic and comic, heroic and cowardly, magnificent and dreary. Like Eliot's masterpiece, The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses sents a realistic picture of the modern wasteland in which modern men are portrayed as vulgar and trivial creatures with splitting personalities, disillusioned ideals, sordid minds and broken families, who are searching in vain for harmonious human relationships and spiritual sustenance in a decaying world.

Joyce spent 17 years working on his last important book, Finnegans Wake (1939).  In this encyclopedic work, Joyce ambitiously attempted to pack the whole history of mankind into one night's dream. In the dream experience, there is no self-conscious logic, no orderly associations, no established values, no limits of time or space; all the past, sent and future are mingled and float freely in the mind. Thus, Finnegans Wake is regarded as the most original experiment ever made in the novel form, and also the most difficult book to read.

James Joyce is one of the most prominent literary figures of the first half of the 20th century. As a great 'artistic genius, Joyce has created a body of work worthy of comparison with the other masterpieces of English literature. In Joyce's opinion, the artist, who wants to reach the highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should rise to the position of a godlike objectivity; he should have the complete conscious control over the creative process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. He should appear as an omniscient author and sent unspoken materials directly from the psyche of the characters, or make the characters tell their own inner thoughts in monologues. This literary approach to the sentation of psychological aspects of characters is usually termed as "stream of consciousness." And Joyce is regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelist, concentrating on revealing in his novels the psychic being of the characters. Another remarkable feature of Joyce's writings is his style. His own style is a straightforward one, lucid, logical and leisurely; subtlety, economy and exactness are his standards. But when he tries to render the so-called stream of consciousness, the style changes: incomplete, rapid, broken wording and fragmentary sentences are the typical features, which reflect the shifting, flirting, disorderly flow of thoughts in the major characters' mind. To create his modern Odyssey -- Ulysses, Joyce adopts a kind of mock-heroic style. The essence of the mock-heroic lies in the application of apparently inappropriate styles. He achieves this mainly by elaborating his style into parody, pastiche, symbolic fantasy, and narration by question and answer from an omniscient narrator. Many critics think that Joyce is a great master of consciousness" to his fantastic engagements with rhetoric, sentimental romance innovation. His radical experimentation ranges from "stream of consciousness” to historical stylistics, counterpoint and exssionist drama. His mastery of the English language and style is always highly praised.