Reception history

A reception history is centrally a history of reading. That history is known to us mainly through acts of writing, including reviews and essays, letters and diary entries. This essay first traces the precondition of such reading: the worldly fortunes of Joyce’s text itself. It then considers a number of significant ways in which Ulysses was read in the first two decades of its existence. Finally, it offers a brief, contextualized history of the academic work produced on Ulysses since the end of Joyce’s life. The Adventures of Ulysses Ulysses was first published in serial form in two magazines. The Little Review, based in New York, published Ulysses irregularly across twenty-two issues from March 1918 to August 1920. Publication commenced with the first episode and reached a single instalment of the fourteenth. The later and longer of these episodes extended over as many as four issues each. Three issues of the magazine containing the serial were seized and burned by the United States Post Office before a full-scale legal confrontation took place over episode thirteen. Meanwhile, the London-based Egoist magazine published only four early episodes of Ulysses in 1919, in part because the London printers refused to set certain episodes in type altogether. In both cases, publication was enabled and encouraged by the American poet and literary impresario Ezra Pound, Joyce’s greatest promoter in the years of the book’s composition