Literature, as Joyce tells us through the character Stephen Dedalus, is "the perpetual affirmation of the spirit of man." Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses endured assertion, legal action, and bitter controversy. This undisputed modernist masterpiece, with its endless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly broad allusions, confirms its status as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd notes in his introduction that Ulysses is "an infinitely open book of utopian revelations." It holds up a mirror to the colonial capital that was Dublin on June 16, 1904, but also offers redeeming glimpses of a future in which the world might be reshaped according to those utopian moments. This edition is the standard Random House/Bodley Head text, first published in 1960.