Plan I. Introduction 3 II. Main part 6

Main article: Dubliners

First ion of Dubliners, 1914
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories first published in 1914,^[377] that form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around the city in the early 20th century. The tales were written when Irish nationalism and the search for national identity was at its peak. Joyce holds up a mirror to that identity as a first step in the spiritual liberation of Ireland.^[378][au] The stories centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment when a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses.^[380] The initial stories are narrated by child protagonists. Later stories deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This aligns with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.^[381]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man[]
Main article: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, is a shortened rewrite of the abandoned novel Stephen Hero. It is a Künstlerroman, a kind of coming-of-age novel depicting the childhood and adolescence of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus and his gradual growth into artistic self-consciousness.^[382] It functions both as an autobiographical fiction of the author and a biography of the fictional protagonist.^[383] Some hints of the techniques Joyce frequently employed in later works, such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and references to a character's psychic reality rather than to his external surroundings are evident throughout this novel.^[384]
Exiles and poetry[]
Main articles: Chamber Music (poetry collection) and Pomes Penyeach
Despite early interest in the theatre, Joyce published only one play, Exiles, begun shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and published in 1918. A study of a husband-and-wife relationship, the play looks back to The Dead (the final story in Dubliners) and forward to Ulysses, which Joyce began around the time of the play's composition.^[385]
He published three books of poetry.^[386] The first full-length collection was Chamber Music (1907), which consisted of 36 short lyrics. It led to his inclusion in the Imagist Anthology, ed by Ezra Pound, a champion of Joyce's work. Other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime includes "Gas from a Burner" (1912), Pomes Penyeach (1927), and "Ecce Puer" (written in 1932 to mark the birth of his grandson and the recent death of his father). These were published by the Black Sun Press in Collected Poems (1936).^[387]
Ulysses[]
Main article: Ulysses (novel)

First ion of Ulysses published by Shakespeare & Company, 1922
The action of the Ulysses starts on 16 June 1904 at 8 am and ends sometime after 2 am the following morning. Much of it occurs inside the minds of the characters, who are portrayed through techniques such as interior monologue, dialogue, and soliloquy. The novel consists of 18 episodes, each covering roughly one hour of the day using a unique literary style.^[388] Joyce structured each chapter to refer to an individual episode in Homer's Odyssey, as well as a specific colour, a particular art or science, and a bodily organ.^[av] Ulysses sets the characters and incidents of Homer's Odyssey in 1904 Dublin, representing Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope, and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus. It uses humor,^[391] including parody, satire and comedy, to contrast the novel's characters with their Homeric models. Joyce played down the mythic correspondences by eliminating the chapter titles^[392] so the work could be read independently of its Homeric structure.^[393]
Ulysses can be read as a study of Dublin in 1904, exploring various aspects of the city's life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Joyce claimed that if Dublin were to be destroyed in some catastrophe, it could be rebuilt using his work as a model.^[394] To achieve this sense of detail, he relied on his memory, what he heard other people remember, and his readings to create a sense of fastidious detail.^[395] Joyce regularly used the 1904 ion of Thom's Directory—a work that listed the owners and tenants of every residential and commercial property in the city—to ensure his descriptions were accurate.^[396] This combination of kaleidoscopic writing, reliance on a formal schema to structure the narrative, and an exquisite attention to detail represents one of the book's major contributions to the development of 20th-century modernist literature.^[397]