Epic Geography

Michael Seidel argues that the places Joyce uses, along with the movements characters make and the directions they take, are central to how Ulysses is built. He shows that Joyce rebuilds the geography of Homer's Odyssey inside Dublin. Joyce's Dublin is not a neutral backdrop, Seidel suggests, but a structure shaped to hold the Odyssey's narrative.

To make this case, Seidel tracks how Joyce reshapes the city's spaces so that they can carry the three arenas of action found in Homer, following the division Victor Bérard drew in his study of the Phoenicians and the Odyssey. The book examines how the novel's Dublin takes on the work of the Mediterranean world of the original epic.

First published in 1976, this edition is part of the Princeton Legacy Library, which reissues out-of-print scholarship from Princeton University Press using print-on-demand technology. The text is preserved as originally published, and the book is available in paperback and hardcover.