sent Ulysses from ten different aspects, all by different
authors.

It is always dangerous, if not arbitrary, to insist that a
collection of essays has a unity of purpose. This is so even
with a volume such as this one, whose essays center on a
particular literary work. The purpose of this collection is,
in fact, based upon multiplicity and diversity rather than
upon any idea of unity or singularity of approach.

The inherent value of any collection of essays rests on
the quality of the individual contributions, and no editor
can ignore this value, but there are others. The editors
of this volume were cognizant of these facts: (1) no novel
of our century has had more critical attention devoted to
it; (2) no novel has been the subject of such a variety of
critical approaches; (3) a great number of the individual
essays on Ulysses have dwelt on one of the eighteen epi-
sodes of the novel. With these facts in mind, each author
was asked to look at one of the central critical problems in
Ulysses and deal with it as well as relate it to the novel as a
whole, and no essay was to be exclusively devoted to a sin-
gle episode. This was the extent of editorial intervention
with regard to the topic that each author chose. On the
basis of their past areas of scholarly interest, however, sev-
eral authors were asked to pursue their previous areas of
inquiry. The most obvious example is Weldon Thornton,
who was asked to write about the function of allusion in
Ulysses after having published his Allusions in Ulysses.

Each author was free to work within these broad para-
meters as he saw fit, and no restrictions or mechanical uni-
formity was imposed by the editors. The variety, contro-
versy, and scope is a result of the individual approaches
and not of premeditated design. The completed essays, if

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