For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921, "Ulysses" has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy.

An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishing wide-ranging allusions confirms its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction that "Ulysses" is 'an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments'.