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The polysystem and the postcolonial: The wondrous adventures of James Joyce and his Ulysses across book markets

The allegedly obscene content of Joyce's Ulysses caused the book to be censored for over a decade in the Anglo-American world. Today, however, Ulysses is considered a “classic”, making one wonder what promoted it from the periphery to the centre of polysystems worldwide. This article uses the figure of James Joyce and the success of his Ulysses to explore issues of marginality/centrality in the postcolonial sense and in the interpretation provided by polysystem theory, integrated here with Appadurai's notion of scapes. It begins by addressing the notions of “the classic”, “the canon” and “centrality” within a polysystem. It then discusses the role of institutions and translators in placing Ulysses and its author at the centre of the Irish and Italian polysystems in particular, and finally probes into the role of (re)translation in protecting the postcolonially subversive potential of the novel from the risk of becoming mainstream once it becomes central in a polysystem.