The Novel and Its Acknowledgments

Joyce ended Ulysses with a flourish:

Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914–1921

And for a good long while, the appended dateline became a fashion in the English-language novel. It may have served Joyce’s thematic purposes, as Edmund Wilson claimed, but for most of Joyce’s imitators, it was little more than a way to fuss over their book, unwilling to let it go without a seal or private notation of some kind.