James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

Modernism is an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts and music, that emphasized experimentation, abstraction and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics and social issues were also aspects of the movement which sought to change how 'human beings in a society interact and live together'. The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized as a rejection of tradition and a hunt for newer, more original means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization and urbanization, as well as cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I. Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, stream of consciousness in literature, cinematic montage, atonal and twelve-tone music and modernist architecture and urban planning.