Epiphany is originally a religious term. James Joyce introduced the term into the field of literature for the first time to explain the aesthetic process in artistic creation. Joyce's truly creative theoretical viewpoint should be his theory of spiritual epiphany. Epiphany is not only a sudden revelation of the underlying meaning of an individual's experience or a situation, but also the revelation of the true meaning of life as a whole, and it is a pure reflection of the truth, the good and the beautiful. In Joyce's novels, he pursued the reform and innovation of art form, and boldly adjusted and rebuilt the inherent literary order of the West. Actually Joyce's artistic innovation reflects the conflict and integration of literary tradition and revolution in the early 20 th century.
Introduction
Brief Life StoryJames Joyce (1882-1941) has a global reputation as an Irish novelist, and is regarded in the West as the most influential novelist in the early 20 th century.He was born in Dublin, Ireland. As a teenager, he attended Jesuit schools. His great enthusiasm for literature, music and Catholic piety became evident in his youth. He later entered the Catholic National University which is today's University College Dublin to study modern language. It was during that time that Joyce took a great interest in literature. After graduation he left Dublin for Paris, hoping to study medicine. But he could not finish the medical study and returned home. Then he got associated with a lot of French literates and read a lot of works of French literature such as Lady Gregory and George Moore. His partiality for literature had been clear. For his later life, he spent most of his time in Switzerland, Italy and France. For more than half a century, his works exerted a great influence on the Western literary field. He was considered to be not only a thorough reformer, but also an outstanding novelist in the Western modem literature.
Literary InnovationAccording to Joyce's view of literature, he intended to make all the components that made up the form of a novel into a new unified whole, independent of these components. The expression of the subtle mental activities can be a necessary way to describe people's deep consciousness. Novelists should emphasize the substitution of morphing, abstraction, simplification and rhythm for photographic simulations of life. His view was somewhat similar to Bell, "novelists should create the Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2023) Clausius Scientific Press, Canada