Few books in the English language seem to demand a companion more insistently than James Joyce's Ulysses, a work that at once entices and terrifies readers with its interwoven promises of pleasure, scandal, difficulty, and mastery. This volume offers fourteen concise and accessible essays by accomplished scholars that explore this masterpiece of world literature. Several essays examine specific aspects of Ulysses, ranging from its plot and characters to the questions it raises about the strangeness of the world and the density of human cultures. Others address how Joyce created this novel, why it became famous, and how it continues to shape both popular and literary culture. Like any good companion, this volume invites the reader to engage in an ongoing conversation about the novel and its lasting ability to entice, rankle, absorb, and enthrall.

Sean Latham is the Pauline Walter McFarlin Endowed Chair of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tulsa, where he serves as editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, coeditor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and codirector of the Modernist Journals Project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He writes and teaches in the areas of media studies, modernism, periodical studies and digital culture. He is the author or editor of several books, including Am I a Snob?: Modernism and the Novel (2003); The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman a Clef (2009); James Joyce: Visions and Revisions (2009); and Joyce's Modernism (2004). His articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA and New Literary History.