When he returned in Ireland he starte 353f58d d living very precariously, drinking too much but on 16^th June 1904 he knew Nora Barnacle, the woman who managed to save him from his complete self-destruction.

She, like James Joyce himself, was a poor girl who had to escape from his alcoholic father and despite of the differences in their education and nature James and Nora fell in love each other. In the same year (1904) the couple left Dublin and moved to Pula then to Trieste where they stayed until 1905. In 1906 James and Nora moved to Rome where the writer obtained a job as clerk. This occupation was boring and tedious so he decided to come back in Trieste where he taught English and formed a strong friendship with Italo Svevo whose "La coscienza di Zeno" shows clearly Joyce's literary influences.

There he worked on his early poems "Dubliners" and "A portrait of an artist as a young man". When in 1914 "Dubliners" was published Joyce began to be known by a lot of European artists, even tough the collection of stories was not so successful on commercial terms.

When the First World War broke out James chose to move to Zurich and, although he remained poor, his reputation as novelists became everyday bigger. In Zurich "Ulysses", probably his best works was written. He finally moved to Paris where Ulysses was published and there he found the optimal intellectual atmosphere, which led him to write his last novels "Finnegans wake". With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 he moved again to Zurich (it is important to remember that The Swiss was always a neutral country) where he died in 1941.

The works

As regard all the literary production of James Joyce it is important to say that it was all influenced by his autobiographical experiences, so we can say that the subject /matter of Joyce's novels resulted from close self-investigation through which he could find his way to a comprehension of the world which can be done only from the inside.

In particular we can follow the same development of his personality and of his works.

1) "Dubliners": Edited in 1914 Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories about life in Dublin. Of them Joyce said: "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous  meanness".

The paralysis to which Joyce is alluding in this extract consists in the mobility and the impossibility of the protagonists of each story to escape from the psychological, social or physical bonds that joined them to Dublin. This deterministic vision of life was probably the results of Pannel's failure. As regard the style and the narrative techniques the work "Dubliners" is essentially a realistic collection of stories with a scrupulous cataloguing of details.

2) "The portrait of the artist as a young man" (1916) is full of autobiographical elements and it deals with the maturity of a young Irishman and his devotion to art. The narrative takes entirely place in the mind of Stephen Dedalus, who is also the fictious projection of Joyce himself.

It is very important to notice the symbolism connected to the protagonist whose name Stephen Devalues recall the first Christian martyr and whose surname remember the mythical architect Devalues who built the palace of Knosso and also the labyrinth in which he was ironically imprisoned. Stephen like Dedalus tried to escape from his prison to become the self-exiled but free artist. Another important features of this novels is that the narration is done in the mind of the protagonist, in fact it records Stephen's reactions to his total environment which is composed by his family, friends, teachers.

The language and style are simpler than "Dubliners" and it develops from the baby language of the opening chapter the fully articulate and analytical comments on aesthetics at the final chapter of the book. This work expressed Joyce's conception of artist's role, which consists in being the "voice" of thoughts and experiences of other man without being influenced by any political or social conventions.

3) "Ulysses" is considered the masterpiece of all Joyce's literary production and it was written during seven years since 1915 until 1922.

It is built basing on four aesthetic principles that are:

1. Everything, every single moment is equally important and can be the object of description or investigation in a novel.
2. If reality cannot be selected in order of importance or of significance that shows that every moment of the life of an individual should be lived in its fullness (it recalls the second aesthetic principle of Oscar Wilde).
3. Our consciousness preserves the memory of all our emotion so that each single moment contains in itself not only traces of our present but also of our past and our future
4. If sometimes happens that one occasional event, or object, or impression may suddenly be charged with the significance of a revelation: to this experience Joyce gave the name of epiphany.

It is of about a thousand pages set in Dublin on a single day- June 16^th 1904- and all the story is based/built on only three characters: Leopold Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus or Telemachus and Molly Bloom who is ironically nicknamed Penelope.

As Homer's Odyssey it is divided into three sections: the first one whose name is Telepathic deals with Stephen Dedalus, the second called Odyssey is about the characters of Ulysses and it is subdivided into twelve parts and the third which consists of three parts and the last one is called Penelope and deals with Molly.

The relation between Stephen Dedalus , who was also the protagonist of "A portrait of the artist as a young man", and Leopold Bloom, is probably one of the most interesting characteristics of this works in fact we can say that all the plot is built only around these two characters.

They are indispensable to each other because Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses or anti-Ulysses, is anxiously looking for the son who he had missed and Stephen is momentarily in search of a paternal figure. In other words they have found each other, moreover both Leopold and Stephen are exiles in their own country: Leopold is a Jewish canvasser who has refused his faith so he is neither a Jewish or a Catholic and his condition is the "quintessence" of exile; but also Stephen has rejected the Catholic faith of his mother and is going to leave Dublin.

This relationship between this two characters is not so simple in fact Stephen and Leopold are also two representatives of two different world, two different mentalities: Leopold is the citizen, the "petit bourgeois", a common /ordinary person whereas Stephen is the artist who has chosen the "exile" for his reasons.

"Ulysses" is surely a masterpiece of the twentieth century literary production because the themes which this work deals with is that of the bourgeois man in the world, in hid daily rituals/customaries, in his unsolved existential drama, theme which was analysed by other important European writers like Kafka, Proust, Svevo...

3) "Finnegars Wake" (1939) is Joyce's last work .It is set in about one night in Dublin and the main characters is H. C. Earwicker whose life story turns out to all mankind. In fact Joyce made use of Gianbattista Vico's theory about "The currency and recurrence of history" to show how one man (H. C: Earwicker) can represent the reality of all men as the initials of his name suggest: H.C.E. could be Here Comes Everyone.

Other works are:

"Stephen Hero" (1944)

"Chamber Music" (1907)

"Pomes Penny Each" (1927)

"Exiles" (1918)

Style and narrative techniques

The most important novelties of Joyce's literary production are surely the concept of epiphany and of stream of consciousness.

As regard the epiphany Joyce gave a definition of it in "Stephen Hero": "By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments".

The original meaning of the term "epiphany" is proper of the Catholic traditions but Joyce use it in the sense of "sudden revelation" and it consists in a word or a situation, which suddenly surface to one's mind memories of the past.  It usually comes after a climax like we can notice in "The dead" the last stories of "Dubliners" in which there is a wide use of the epiphany.

But another important stylistic features which James Joyce introduced is the famous "stream of consciousness" which is strictly connected of the interior monologue. It was a technique just used by some writer oh the 18^th century like Sterne, Dorothy Richardson and the French Dujardin but it was developed and perfectioned by Joyce who also knew the revolutionary theories of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud.

Thanks to the stream of consciousness, which is the free flowing of the feelings and of the thoughts of the protagonist and of the other characters, Joyce can dug into the character's mind and explain the way the human mind works through associations of things for example coming from the outside.

It is very important to talk about the results of the use of these new narrative expedients in all European literary production, which can be simply divided, in two main points:

It allowed the reader to know the mind of character, which shows all his thoughts, feelings, rational and irrational sides.

It liberated the novel from the presence of narrator, which was essentially an omniscient narrator who usually gave to the characters his point of view, his believes and political opinions, while whit the use of the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness we have a multiple and different point of view.

With the use of the interior monologue Joyce abolished the narrator's presence because in that way the reader is projected in character's mind. This implied the use of third person, the total absence of punctuation, quotation marks and or of verbs like "to say, to tell, to think...".

The language is rich in puns of words and there is a large use of contrast, paradoxes, false clues and symbols which are usually connected to the real things. Foreign words, literary quotations and allusions to other texts are typical of "Ulysses".