On this day...

James Joyce moves into Sandycove's Martello Tower in 1904. Originally a defensive outpost against a Napoleonic invasion, the tower was leased from the British War Office by Joyce's friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. However, after reports of numerous fracas, including one in which Gogarty pointed a gun in his direction, Joyce left the dwelling after only a week.

Yet despite being such a fleeting moment, the experience was immortalised in Joyce's most famous work 'Ulysses'. With Gogarty depicted as the 'stately, plump Buck Mulligan', their relationship is explored within the first chapter. The tower has subsequently appeared on bank notes, and numerous covers of the novel, and currently houses a museum dedicated to the writer

On this day...

Dubliners gather to celebrate Bloomsday in celebration of author James Joyce. Derived from the name of 'Ulysses' protagonist Leopold Bloom, the date also orginates from the popular modernist novel. All the book's events take place within a single day, June 16th 1904, to commerate the author's first outing with his wife-to-be Nora Barnacle. First taking place in 1954 when a group of devotees attempted a pilgrimage along the novel's route, Bloomsday involves numerous 'Ulysses' based festivities.

Marathon readings, themed walks around the city and costume wearing all take place, as do, perhaps slightly less traditional pub crawls and all day eatings. Bloomsday is also celebrated in New York, Genoa, and Szombathely - a Hungarian town, which appears as the fictional birthplace of Leopold Bloom's father, Virag Rudolf. The literary significance of this day was not lost on poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who, by special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury, got married on June 16th in honour of Bloomsday.

On this day...

James Joyce's 'Dubliners', a collection of short stories, was published in 1914. Much like his later works, 'Dubliners' is firmly rooted in the Irish nationalist movement that was prevalent at the time, and thus many characters in the collection reappear in Joyce's most famous work 'Ulysses', though often in more minor roles. Yet the task of getting the stories to publication was an arduous one, Joyce claiming the event required 'nine years of my life'. Indeed one previous edition, that of 1910 even 'was burnt entire almost in my presence'.

The aim of the collection, Joyce stated, was to give the Irish 'one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass', and thus, It is not my fault,that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories'. The central literary focus of Joyce's work is based around his idea of epiphanies, and the stories themselves are separated into childhood, adolesence and maturity, with the narrators, and protagonists, becoming progressively older. Although not considered his best work, 'Dubliners' is undoubtedly another gem of the Joyce production line.

On this day...

As today is, of course, St. Patrick's day, it seems appropriate to have a look at some of the great literature Ireland has produced. Bursting forth with the dual force of playwrights Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, Irish literature really found its feet in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Of course there had been notable writers before, such as Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith, yet none had, or possibly ever will, hit the heights that both Wilde and Shaw achieved. 'The Importance of Being Earnest', 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', 'Pygmalion', 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' - all caused scandal, reality, shock or acceptance, yet above all, they are alll regarded as some of the finest examples of literature.

Although Wilde did write one novel, Ireland's best prose writers are found in the form of Bram Stoker, creator of 'Dracula', and later modernist James Joyce, whose best known work is 'Ulysses'. Finally, so as not to exclude any genre, Ireland has a history of great poets. William Butler Yeats is arguably the most recognisable, courtesy of such works of 'The Tower'. Yet, of course, Ireland still has a poet very much in the spotlight, in Seamus Heaney, creator of such collections as 'The Spirit Level'. Ireland has been the recepient of 4 Nobel Prizes for Literature, and can boast about having one of the oldest literary traditions, after Greek and Latin.

On this day...

One of the most important works of modernist literature, James Joyce's 'Ulysses', was published in 1922. The novel was first serialised in American magazine 'The Little Review' between 1918 and 1920, but it was not until two years later that the work was published in its entirety. From a young age, Joyce was infatuated with Ulysses, otherwise known Odysseus, writing a school essay in which he described him as his 'favourite hero'. Calling Ulysses the only all-round character in literature, this fascination continued into Joyce's literary career. The name was originally thought of as a title for the popular work 'The Dubliners', but later transferred to Joyce's epic novel. The novel itself, of over 265,000 words, is narrated in stream-of-conciousness form, ensuring its place as first in the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Yet its journey has not always been smooth. Joyce himself said that he 'put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant' and indeed such seemed the confusion, that the novel was banned for obscenity in the United States and later in the United Kingdom. Since then, eighteen editions are thought to have been published; each an imitation on the last.

On this day...

Russian author Anton Chekhov was born in 1860. The son of an abusive father, who is said to have formed many of his ideas on hypocrisy, Chekhov used simply the word 'suffering' to describe his childhood. When the family was declared bankrupt, they fled to Moscow, leaving the young Anton behind to sell their possessions. During this time, Chekhov began to write and upon moving to Moscow to attend the medical university, he utilised this talent to provide for his family. Writing under various pseudonyms, including 'man without a spleen', he contributed copious numbers of articles to prestigious city-based newspapers and periodicals; a period that culminated in him winning the Pushkin Prize, under the tutelage of Dmitry Grigorovich. Despite now suffering from tuberculosis, Chekhov encountered prolific literary form and went on to produce works now recognised in Russia's golden age of literature. 'Uncle Vanya', 'The Seagull' and 'The Cherry Orchard' are just three of Chekhov's best known works; works that acquired him the adulation of writers such as Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, and most notably, George Bernard Shaw.

On this day...

Irish writer James Joyce, died in 1941 at the age of 58. Offered a place at a Jesuit college, Joyce was meant to join the Order, but rejected Catholicism at the age of 16; a decision reflected in several of his novels. Instead he enrolled at University College Dublin, becoming heavily involved in the literary scene and producing his first piece of published work; a review of Ibsen's drama for which he received a note of thanks from the man himself. Yet his experiences over the subsequent years were far from savoury. The death of Joyce's mother induced a serious bout of drinking which never truly abated until his death, and by 1904, he was living in self-imposed exile with former chambermaid Nora Barnacle. Upon moving back to Dublin eight years later, Joyce attempted to supplement his income through several schemes, thought to include the trading of Irish tweeds, and plans to become a cinema tycoon. Yet ultimately Joyce found that his only solace, and real monetary reward, lay in the writing for which he had a remarkable talent. Considered alongside Virginia Woolf as one of the foremost modernist writers, Joyce's most famous works include 'Dubliners' and 'Ulysses'; the latter enduring a censorship for obscenity, to become one of the best known books of the 20th century.

Ulysses drinks life to the lees...

This day also saw a infamous court ruling over James Joyce's novel, 'Ulysses' in 1933. The novel, written over a seven year period, had been serialised in the U.S. magazine 'The Little Review' in 1918, but following the publication of a particularly lewd passage for the time, the New York Society for the Supression of Vice took action against it. A trial declared the magazine obscene in 1921, leading to the book being banned in the U.S; mirroring a similar scenario in Britain. However, in 1933, a federal judge ruled against the original verdict; a decision that was confirmed by the Court of Appeal in 1934 and led to the book being reinstated in both countries. Joyce's novel, written using a stream of conciuosness technique, contains approximately 265,000 words from a 30,030 word vocabulary. It is based on Greek mythological hero Odysseus, and is often described as one of the most important works of modernist literature.