Cretonne was originally a strong, white fabric with a hempen warp and linen weft.

The word is sometimes said to be derived from Creton, a village in Normandy where the manufacture of linen was carried on;^{[citation needed]} some other serious sources mention that the cretonne was invented by Paul Creton, an inhabitant of Vimoutiers in the Pays d'Auge, Lower Normandy, France, a village very active in the textile industry in the past centuries.^{[citation needed]}

The word is now applied to a strong, printed cotton cloth, which is stouter than chintz but used for very much the same purposes. It is usually unglazed and may be printed on both sides and even with different patterns. Frequently cretonne has a fancy woven pattern of some kind which is modified by the printed design. It is sometimes made with a weft of cotton waste.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.

Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."