James Joyce was indeed taking the art of the novel to new limits, and was exploring themes and angles of perspective that had never before been attempted by novelists of his present era. He had opened the door on a new form of expression, pulled the philosophy of relativism that was being created by the scientists living in his day, and placed such language and exprssionism into a form of literary fictional prose. Some scholars have named Joyce to be the father of modernism. Although, Ulysses is a groundbreaking novel, with many of the elements of modernism, it is difficult to determine who exactly invented this literary form of writing. When viewing the art and writing of this period, it appears that there were several artists working on these ideas over several years. Modernism did not suddenly spring out of the mind of one man. Those cocepts of intellectual thought had been gathering for a number of years from a variety of different perspectives. Modernism can be seen as a window leading into a framework of the mind, but one belonging to several doors constructed by a host of nameless architects. Nola Tully, a notable scholar on James Joyce describes the sort of intellectual soup bowl from which Ulysses may have originated.
"Joyce is often considered a pioneer of modernism, but by the time Joyce was writing Ulysses, the methods of narrative representation had already changed radically. By the turn of the century, Joseph Conrad had begun to experiment with the form of the novel. For Conrad and others there was no new story to tell; invention resided in method. In Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, published in 1899, story is a vehicle for personal impressions, a recording of experiences of an interior and highly psychological nature. His innovations of story structure served as provenance for such writers as Joyce, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Other core modernist writers of fiction in English include Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Modernism in poetry is often associated with the publication of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" in l917. The year l922 saw the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land. By l933, the time of Woosey's decision, Virginia Woolf had written The Waves." (1)
As can be seen, there were several writers working on this new genre at the same time, many unaware that they were even creating a new
