Joyce was born in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, where she spent her adolescence. He left Ireland in 19 12 and never returned home. Joyce had few works in his life, but there were six: a play, a collection of poems, a collection of short stories Dubliners (19 14) and a novella Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (19 16). Two novels, Ulysses (1922) and finnegan's wake (1939). However, all these works were written in Ireland. He once said: "My purpose is to write a spiritual history for my motherland. I chose Dublin as the background, because I think this city is the center of paralysis ... "This is how Joyce used his whole life's energy, focused on time and consciousness, and truly reproduced the Irish spiritual life with what he called" a sloppy and despicable style ",thus profoundly revealing the problems and crises faced by the whole era.
As mentioned above, Joyce did not have many works in his life, and most of his works were obscure (it is said that the book Wake for Finnegan can only be understood by scholars who specialize in Joyce with the help of a special vocabulary). He was also a writer who caused heated debates and was criticized and attacked by various kinds during his lifetime. However, in more than half a century after his death, studies on Joyce and his works have emerged one after another all over the world. According to statistics, these research books are enough to fill a library. Why is Joyce so influential? This is mainly due to his skillful stream of consciousness skills and his bold experiments and reforms on the layout and narrative form of the novel. From The Portrait of a Young Artist to Ulysses, the masterpiece of stream of consciousness, to the obscure fantasy novel Wake for Finnigan, Joyce's works almost exhausted all the novel expressive arts in the 20th century. Therefore, it is worthy of the name that Joyce initiated a new generation of literary creation.