About the Project

The purpose of The Joyce Project is to present an online edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses that comprehensively assists readers of this great modern novel, as they read. Joyce’s other fictions (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegans Wake), his critical writings, and his other works are mentioned in many notes, but the site does not seek to aid readers of those works. 

Ulysses, which incorporates so many different kinds of content, has always threatened to exceed the knowledge base of its readers and to overwhelm the reading process. The literary allusions alone seem to demand that shelves of other books lie open next to the novel, and other sorts of reference compound the problem exponentially. Must one walk the streets of Dublin to find order in the protagonists’ meanderings? Experience the spectacle of a Catholic priest approaching the altar to understand what Mulligan means by Introibo ad altare Dei? Know Mozart's Don Giovanni to relate La ci darem la mano to the Blooms' marital drama, and have Victorian music-hall tunes floating through one’s head to appreciate the phrase Woodman, Spare That Tree? The answer to thousands of such questions is Yes.

The changes in communication since the arrival of HTML in 1990 have made it possible simultaneously to reduce the number of required reference materials and to expand the dimensions of the reader’s enjoyment of the novel. Written notes can be linked to passages of text, allowing immediate access to contextualizing information, and further hyperlinks can carry the reader to related notes and textual passages. Visual images and videos available within the public domain can enrich the verbal information. Scholarly studies can be integrated into the reading experience. Today all of these resources can be made available on a single computer screen. This vision drives the construction of The Joyce Project.

This not-for-profit educational website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works United States License. Content may be freely copied and distributed if it is not altered in any way or used for commercial purposes, and if full attribution and a link to the site are provided. For citation purposes, each note lists a title at the beginning and author and year of publication at the end. Most images and videos on the site are in the public domain, but some may enjoy copyright protection. I attempt to follow U.S. fair-use guidelines and to identify creators, owners, and sources in the captions. Please include that information when reproducing an image or video.