On July 20, 1998, the editorial board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House – a jury made up of ten writers, critics and editors, among whom were A. S. Byatt, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Shelby Foote and Christopher Cerf – revealed to the public the list they had drawn up of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century. Joyceans from all over the word could rejoice: Ulysses came up first, soon followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the third position. More unexpected but quite as heartening for fans was the fact that Finnegans Wake had found its way into the list as number seventy-seven. No doubt Joyce would have loved the elegant numerological progression: 1 – 3 – 77. As a new century begins, perhaps the time has come for another assessment: will Joyce's stature still tower above the English-speaking world in the twenty-first century, or was this critical acclaim just a way of leaving behind us an embarrassing literary monument? In 1998, moreover, the backlash was immediate, the ten jury members were denounced as elitist and sexist by disgruntled cavilers. Had they been twelve, they might have been identified with the apostles of a new Joycean creed – as the famous collective study Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress launched the ironical concept as early as 1929, just before the world economy collapsed and Joyce's personal life became fraught with diffculties.