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He was born in Dublin in 1882 of a middle-class Irish Catholic family. He took a trip to Paris but the visit was cut by his mother's death. In 1904 Joyce took two steps that were to determine the direction of his life and save him from complete self-destruction in Dublin. He met Nora Barnacle and with her he left Ireland for voluntary exile. They first moved to Austria and than settled in Trieste where Joyce made friend with Svevo. The first of his works to appear in form book was Chamber Music, a collection of 36 short poems. His first important novel Dubliners was a collection of short stories about Dublin and Dublin's life. After that Joyce print "a portrait of the artis as a young man". With the outbreak of th First World War Joyce decided to move to Zurich. There he started working on his new novel Ulysses, considered as his masterpiece. He moved to Paris, the intellectual capital of Europe. Joyce felt able to push his experimenting with technique to its final extreme in his last work "Finnegans wake". With the outbreak of the Second World War Joyce returned to Zurich, where he died in 1941.

Features and themes

Joyce wanted to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people in fact he was able to represent the whole of man's mental, emotional and biological reality of the time.

Subjective perception of time

The plots in the novels are confused and they are not introduced by an omniscent narrator but they are explored from different points of view. Joyce's novels open with the analysis of a particular moment and the portrait of the character is based on introspection rather than a description. Time is not perceived as objective but as subjective leading to psychological change. The description of Dublin derived from the characters thoughts and mind floating.

Impersonality of the artist

Joyce belived in the impersonality of the artist. According to him the artist's task was to render life objectively in order to give back to the readers a true image of it.

Style

His style technique and language developed from the realism and clear prose of the Dubliners to interior monologue of his last novels, where language breaks down into a succession of words without punctuation or grammar connection. Joyce's literary production is usually split into two periods:

1) the First Period of his works is marked by a realistic technique: the plot is quite linear in its development and rich in details; the syntax is logical and the language reflects everyday language. One of the most significant works of this period is "Dubliners".

2) The Second Period of Joyce's writing sees the transition from a somewhat traditional approach to a stage of experimentation, rich in symbolism and allegory. The bes-known work of this period is "Ulysses".