James Joyce's reputation precedes him more than most writers. Without even reading a line of his work, throngs of people can confidently tell you that he was the near-blind Irish renegade, wandering exile, and self-obsessed artist who made book-reading unnecessarily difficult. Joyce can be difficult, but he is actually a lot of fun to read. You don't have to be a professional literary critic to enjoy him. In fact, if you give him a first or maybe even a second try, you will find that the rewards are endless and open to everyone.

Tracking down an introduction to Joyce can be pretty tricky. By now there is such a mass of critical studies, guides, and glossaries that it is hard to figure out where you can go for the basics. The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce has been written with this dilemma in mind. It provides some of the Joyce abcs and includes an overview of his life, his contexts, his works, and a brief history of his critical reception. The Life chapter provides a bare bones biographical account of Joyce's wanderings between Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Readers who want a more fleshed-out portrait of the artist are encouraged to consult Richard Ellmann's James Joyce and John McCourt's The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920. In the Contexts chapter, I examine how Joyce's “Irishness,” which he explored in his Italian newspaper articles, translations, and lectures, was intimately connected with his own becoming as a writer.