June 16th is Bloomsday! What is Bloomsday?
It is
a celebration of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce which all takes place on
Thursday, June 16th 1904 in Dublin, Ireland and is named for the
central character, Leopold Bloom.
The first celebration of Bloomsday in Ireland was 1954 for
the 50th anniversary, and continues to this day with special visits
to the places mentioned in the novel. But people around the world celebrate
Bloomsday too, with people dressing up as characters from the book, hosting readings,
re-enactments, and performances, as well as creating food and drink from the
book.
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| Celebrators (1999), image from Wikipedia |
Importance of Ulysses
The book itself was published February 2, 1922 by Sylvia
Beach through her bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris. In the 100 years since
its publication, Ulysses has been celebrated and censored, banned and cherished.
Banned on obscenity charges while still in draft chapters and again in a 1928 US Customs
trial, the book afterwards was seized at US customs and burned because it “might cause
American readers to harbor "impure and lustful thoughts".” This ban
was challenged in court and lifted in 1934; the free speech arguments in defense
of Ulysses in that landmark case have shaped the subsequent
debates about literature’s rights to freedom of expression to this day.
The Archer Library is lucky to have a copy from this first seized 1922 run of Ulysses in our Special Collections seen here
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| 1922 copy of Ulysses - Archer Library Special Collections |
To learn more about Bloomsday here are some of the official websites:
https://jamesjoyce.ie/bloomsday/ (James Joyce Center)
http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/ (Festival page)
https://www.ireland.com/en-us/things-to-do/events/bloomsday-festival/
(Ireland’s tourism page)
Want to read the book yourself?
Read the book here: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300
Listen to the audio book here: https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook
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| First page of Ulysses (1922 edition) |
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