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Publication history

Written over a seven-year period from 1914 to 1921, the novel was serialised in the American journal The Little Review from 1918 until the publication of the Nausicaä episode led to a prosecution for obscenity.^[13] In 1919, sections of the novel also appeared in the London literary journal The Egoist, but the novel itself was banned in the United Kingdom until the 1930s.^{[citation needed]} In 1920 after the US magazine The Little Review serialized a passage of the book dealing with the main character masturbating, a group called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who objected to the book's content, took action to attempt to keep the book out of the United States. At a trial in 1921 the magazine was declared obscene and as a result Ulysses was banned in the United States. In 1933, the publisher Random House arranged to import the French edition and have a copy seized by customs when the ship was unloaded, which it then contested. In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled on December 6, 1933 that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene,^[14] a decision that has been called "epoch-making" by Stuart Gilbert.^[15] The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in 1934.^[16]

The publication history of Ulysses is disputed and obscure. There have been at least eighteen editions, and variations in different impressions of each edition. Notable editions include the first edition published in Paris on 2 February 1922 by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company (only 1000 copies printed), the pirated Roth edition, published in New York in 1929, the Odyssey Press edition of 1932 (including some revisions by Stuart Gilbert, and therefore sometimes considered the most accurate edition); the 1934 Random House US edition, the first English edition of the Bodley Head in 1936, the revised Bodley Head Edition of 1960, the revised Random House edition of 1961 (reset from the Bodley Head 1960 edition), and the Gabler edition of 1984.

According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most accurate edition published.^[17] As each subsequent edition attempted to correct these mistakes, it incorporated more of its own. Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition was an attempt to produce a corrected text, but it has received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd's main theoretical criticism is of Gabler's choice of a patchwork of manuscripts as his copy-text (the base edition with which the editor compares each variant). This choice is problematic, in that there is no unified manuscript as such: Joyce wrote approximately 30% of the final text as marginal notes on the typescripts and proof sheets. Perhaps more confusing is the fact that for hundreds of pages the extant manuscript is merely a 'fair copy' Joyce made for sale to a patron. For about half the chapters of Ulysses Joyce's final draft is lost. For these, the existing typescript is the last witness. Gabler attempted to reconstruct what he called 'the continuous manuscript text', which had never physically existed, by adding together all of Joyce's accretions from the various sources. This allowed Gabler to produce a 'synoptic text' indicating the stage at which each addition was inserted. Kidd and even some of Gabler's own advisers believe this method meant losing Joyce's final changes in about two thousand places. Far from being 'continuous', the manuscripts seem to be opposite. Jerome McGann describes in detail the editorial principles of Gabler in his article for the journal Criticism, issue 27, 1985. Still other commentators have charged that Gabler's perhaps spurious changes were motivated by a desire to secure a fresh copyright and another seventy-five years of royalties beyond a looming expiration date.

In June 1988 John Kidd published 'The Scandal of Ulysses' in the New York Review of Books, charging that not only did Gabler's changes overturn Joyce's last revisions, but in another four hundred places Gabler failed to follow any manuscript whatever, making nonsense of his own premises. Kidd accused Gabler of unnecessarily changing Joyce's spelling, punctuation, use of accents, and all the small details he claimed to have been restoring. Instead, Gabler was actually following printed editions such as that of 1932, not the manuscripts. More fatally, Gabler was found to have made genuine blunders, the most famous being his changing the name of Dubliner Harry Thrift to 'Shrift' and cricket hero Captain Buller to Culler. (These 'corrections' were undone by Gabler in 1993.)

In December 1988, Charles Rossman's 'The New Ulysses: The Hidden Controversy' for the New York Review revealed that Gabler's own advisers felt too many changes were being made, but that the publishers were pushing for as many alterations as possible. Then Kidd produced a 174-page critique that filled an entire issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, dated the same month. This 'Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text' was the next year published in book format and on floppy disk by the James Joyce Research Center at Boston University, which Kidd founded and led from 1988 to 2000. Gabler and others rejected Kidd's critique, and the scholarly community has been divided in this ongoing debate.

In 1990 Gabler's American publisher Random House quietly replaced the Gabler edition with its 1961 version, and in the United Kingdom the Bodley Head press revived its 1960 version. In both the UK and USA, Everyman Books, too, republished the 1960 Ulysses. In 1992 Penguin dropped Gabler and reprinted the 1960 text. The Gabler version is at present only available from Vintage International. From one hundred percent of world paperback sales in 1986-1990, the Gabler edition has dropped to perhaps ten percent of the market. Reprints of the imperfect 1922 first edition are now widely available, despite Gabler's (often disputed) claim that it had 'five thousand errors'.

In 1992 W.W. Norton announced that John Kidd's own edition of Ulysses was about to be published as part of a series called "The Dublin Edition of the Works of James Joyce." This book had to be withdrawn, however, when the Joyce estate objected. The estate has chosen to refuse to authorize any further editions of Joyce's work for the present.^[18]