QUOTE : No-one would claim that, for its part, Ulysses was widely read or easily understood. By any standards it demands patience and unwavering concentration. But in the current of twentieth century literature it stands like a great rock which cannot easily be passed by. To ask whether Joyce was a greater writer than Faulkner, Hemingway or E.M. Forster is a fatuous question, as pointless as asking whether Jane Austen was a greater writer than Charlotte Bronte or Flaubert than Stendhal. What is certain is that he cannot be ignored. Ulysses was a landmark. It influenced the course of serious fiction writing as no other novel of the twentieth century. It can be criticised, challenged, disliked, but like its author it cannot be ignored.