James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 into a middle class Catholic family whose social status and financial resources gradually diminished. The decay of the father became representative for Joyce of the failures of his own country.Joyce went to two Jesuit school and graduated in Modern Languages at University College in Dublin.
Finding life in Ireland an obstacle to his own artistic development, he committed himself to a life of self-imposed exile : he went first to Paris, then to Pola and finally to Trieste. In Trieste he finished his first two works : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) ; Dubliners (1914) , a collection of fifteen short stories (The Dead), and partly autobiographical.
At the outbreak of World War I he left for Zurich, where he started working on his masterpiece Ulysses.
After an eye-operation he moved to Paris, there Joyce was considered one of the prophets of Modernism and these Ulysses was finally published (1922). Here he started to write his last great novel, Finnegans Wake until 1923 and came out in 1939.
When France was occupied by German, Joyce's family (except his daughter) returned to Zurich where he died in 1941.The relationship between Joyce and Ireland is complex. At surface level he seems to rejected everything that was Irish ; at a deeper level all of Joyce's works are centred on Ireland and on the Dublin he knew.
The Dubliners embody Joyce's idea of "paralysis". The paralysis of will leads ordinary man to accept the limitation of the society where they live.
Joyce himself coined the definition "epiphany" which means 'manifestation, showing' , to indicate that moment when a simple object of fact suddenly flash out with meaning and make a person realize himself.
