Daniel Mulhall – författare

Marking the centenary of Ireland’s – and possibly the world’s – most famous novel, this joyful introductory guide opens up Ulysses to a whole new readership, offering insight into the literary, historical and cultural elements at play in James Joyce’s masterwork.Both eloquent and erudite, this book is an initiation into the wonders of Joyce’s writing and of the world that inspired it, written by Daniel Mulhall, Ireland’s ambassador to the United States and an advocate for Irish literature around the world.One hundred years on from that novel’s first publication, Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey takes us on a journey through one of the twentieth century’s greatest works of fiction. Exploring the eighteen chapters of the novel and using the famous structuring principle of Homer’s Odyssey as our guide, Daniel Mulhall releases Ulysses from its reputation of impenetrability, and shows us the pleasure it can offer us as readers.

When W.B. Yeats became the first Irish person to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, the Swedish Academy was crediting him with giving expression to ‘the spirit of a whole nation’. The prize established Yeats as the unofficial poet laureate of a country that had, in his own words, been ‘transformed utterly’ during the preceding decade.From the Celtic Twilight of the 1890s to his death in 1939, Yeats’s writings offer a unique window through which to view the changing Ireland of his time. In PILGRIM SOUL, Daniel Mulhall’s highly accessible and illuminating guide to Yeats, the poet’s special role in Irish affairs is examined closely. Each chapter opens with a major Yeats poem through which Mulhall examines the historical events that inspired it. Along the way, he explores Yeats’s ‘indomitable’ Irishness, the roots of his periodic disenchantment with Ireland and the conservative politics of his later years as well as the way Yeats’s lifelong encounter with Irish affairs helped reshape his poetry.Throughout his life, Yeats produced compelling images of his homeland for readers in Ireland and around the world. As a personal journey through Yeats’s poetry and his life, PILGRIM SOUL mirrors Daniel Mulhall’s own four decades as an ambassador for Ireland, its people and its culture.