The Art of a Day

Why tell a story set in just one day? Writer James Marriott explores the single day - or circadian - artwork, pioneered by James Joyce’s epic Ulysses, published in February 1922, and generally considered a landmark moment in the emergence of the modernist movement before it swept through European culture.

What made Joyce choose to set his “odyssey” within these confines? And what has been the cultural impact and long afterlife of the one-day artwork, from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to Groundhog Day? We speak to Ulysses experts, novelists including AL Kennedy and Ian McEwan who continue to draw inspiration from it and make the one-day form their own, critic Rhianna Dhillon, and literature-loving physicist Carlo Rovelli who unravels the many timescales at play in these artworks, and perhaps even the nature of time itself.

Presenter: James Marriott
Producer: Beth Sagar-Fenton