For Joyce, literature is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man. Written between 1914 and 1921, Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm 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. This edition is the standard Random House/Bodley Head text that first appeared in 1960. This Annotated Students Edition has full explanatory notes which use the internationally recognized system of line numbers for critical reference.