James Joyce Research Paper

James Joyce is said to be one of the most innovative and influential writers of the modern time. He was a novelist, poet, short story writer, and a playwright. Joyce made “the modern world possible for art,” according to T.S. Elliot (Litz 16). James Joyce was an Irish modernist writer. His writing was known for its intricacy and vulgar comedy. He pushed the limits with books such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In his writings, Joyce was always meeting himself “in ways which must at times have been beyond his conscious ordinance” (Stone). He would write about his views and never realize what he was doing. When he began to write “Araby,” he subconsciously started to write about a time in his life that he would always think about. He wrote about …show more content…
Coleridge decided to write about the supernatural in his piece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Ulysses, Joyce went through the normal day in Dublin. For this book, Joyce did not want to be defined in a single genre; he wanted to “break down the accepted distinctions between genres and to create a new, unique form out of the resulting confusion” (Litz 78). In Ulysses, the main character Stephen is struggling with his faith. He claims to no longer believe, but his conscious and Irish-Catholic heritage cannot escape him. In the early Romantic period, it is said that people believed that “the Creator and the created are one, that God suffuses and interfuses the universe, and that all that lives is in and of God” (Dabundo). While many people believed in this, Coleridge grew very uncomfortable with this thought and returned to the Church of England. This helped Coleridge with the aesthetics of his writing. During this time, the American Revolution had just taken place, and the British were on the verge of an uprising. Due to this fear, the government prohibited any public meetings. The Industrial revolution was also taking place during this time, causing people to move to the city, leaving their farms. This caused the economy to suffer, and the poverty rate to steadily increase. The writers of this period did not claim to be romantic writers; however, they did have a sense of change. They felt as if they were experimenting with their writing, thinking outside of the box. Poets, like Coleridge, began to look at the simple things in life such as nature and saw how it connected to God, love, and a sense of family. The writers of the twentieth century were not much different. They wanted “to stand outside the conventional boundaries of law, behavior, or social class” (Dettmar). The time known as the Modern period is known as 1914 until the start of the war in 1939 (Dettmar). Modernism was defined by