A festival dedicated to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is touring 18 European cities, with artists and writers linking the work to contemporary issues such as immigration. Ulysses, published in 1922, counts among the 20th century’s key novels, and its centenary has already sparked much celebration in Joyce’s native Ireland. But Liam Browne, co-artistic curator of Ulysses European Odyssey, said the tour is to go beyond the kind of literary fandom seen at home. “What interested us was Joyce as a European figure, rather than an Irish figure,” he told AFP on the margins of the tour event in Marseille on the southern French coast. “In his imagination he was engaging with Dublin to write his novels but actually his day-to-day existence was in these European cities,” Browne said. The first edition of the famous book. Photo: Wikipedia The crude language and sexual content in Ulysses meant there was no chance of it getting published in conservative 1920s Ireland or anywhere else in the English-speaking world. It became the target of an obscenity trial in the United States, and was banned in Britain for more than a decade. In the end, it was published in Paris by American Sylvia Beach, owner...
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