Dante speaks of such grand affairs as heaven and hell, church and state, while Joyce loftily dismisses the lot of them. …… Dante chose to write in the vernacular (and thus for the common reader) rather than in Latin, and in doing so played a major role in establishing everyday Italian as the literary language of his people. It was a choice which helped to revolutionise the writing of other European cultures as well. …… For his part, Joyce has an uncannily well-tuned ear for the speech of working-class Dubliners, and Ulysses, which is awash with pub talk, gossip, political polemic and satirical invective, is one of the first novels in English to portray what we might now call mass culture.
A few days of listening to Dubliners speak made it much easier for me to read Ulysses. You might say it is written in Dublinese.
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