Dubliners

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Dubliners
Joyce - Dubliners, 1914 - 3690390 F.jpg
Title page of the first edition in 1914 of Dubliners
Author James Joyce
LanguageEnglish
GenreShort story collection
Publisher Grant Richards Ltd., London
Publication date
June 1914
Pages152
OCLC 23211235
823/.912 20
LC Class PR6019.O9 D8 1991
Text Dubliners at Wikisource

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. [1] It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.

Contents

The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. Joyce felt Irish nationalism, like Catholicism and British rule of Ireland, was responsible for a collective paralysis. [2] He conceived of Dubliners as a "nicely polished looking-glass" [3] held up to the Irish and a "first step towards [their] spiritual liberation". [4]

Joyce's concept of epiphany [5] is exemplified in the moment a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. The first three stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, while the subsequent stories are written in the third person and deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people, in line with Joyce's division of the collection into "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life". [6] Many of the characters in Dubliners later appeared in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses . [7]

Publication history

Between 1905, when Joyce first sent a manuscript to a publisher, and 1914, when the book was finally published (on June 15), Joyce submitted the book 18 times to a total of 15 publishers. The London house of Grant Richards agreed to publish it in 1905. Its printer, however, refused to set one of the stories ("Two Gallants"), and Richards then began to press Joyce to remove a number of other passages that he claimed the printer also refused to set. Under protest, Joyce eventually agreed to some of the requested changes, but Richards ended up backing out of the deal anyway. Joyce thereupon resubmitted the manuscript to other publishers, and, about three years later (1909), he found a willing candidate in Maunsel & Roberts of Dublin. A similar controversy developed, and Maunsel too refused to publish the collection, even threatening to sue Joyce for printing costs already incurred. Joyce offered to pay the printing costs himself if the sheets were turned over to him and he was allowed to complete the job elsewhere and distribute the book, but, when he arrived at the printers, they refused to surrender the sheets and burned them the next day, though Joyce managed to save one copy, which he obtained "by ruse". He returned to submitting the manuscript to other publishers, and in 1914 Grant Richards once again agreed to publish the book, using the page proofs saved from Maunsel as copy. [8]

The stories

A Joyce critic has examined the significance of each title. [9]

Style

Besides first-person and third-person narration, Dubliners employs free indirect discourse and shifts in narrative point of view. The collection progresses chronologically, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in "The Dead". [10] Throughout, Joyce can be said to maintain "invisibility", to use his own term for authorial effacement. [11] He wrote the stories "in a style of scrupulous meanness", withholding comment on what is "seen and heard". [12] Dubliners can beseen as a preface to the two novels that will follow, [13] and like them it "seeks a presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be interference". [14]

Joyce's modernist style entailed using dashes for dialogue rather than quotation marks. [15] He asked that they be used in the printed text, but was refused. [16] Dubliners was the only work by Joyce to use quotation marks, but dashes are now substituted in all critical and most popular editions. [17]

The impersonal narration doesn't mean that Joyce is undetectable in Dubliners. There are autobiographical elements and possible versions of Joyce had he not left Dublin. [18] The Dublin he remembers is recreated in the specific geographic details, including road names, buildings, and businesses. Joyce freely admitted that his characters and places were closely based on reality. (Because of these details, at least one potential publisher, Maunsel and Company, rejected the book for fear of libel lawsuits.) [19] Ezra Pound argued that, with the necessary changes, "these stories could be retold of any town", that Joyce "gives us things as they are... for any city", by "getting at the universal element beneath" particulars. [20]

Joyce referred to the collection as "a series of epicleti", alluding to the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. [21] He is said to have "often agreed... that 'imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered'". [22] But he used the eucharist as a metaphor, characterizing the artist as "a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life". [23]

The concept of “epiphany,” defined in Stephen Hero as “a sudden spiritual manifestation,” has been adapted as a narrative device in five stories in Dubliners, in the form of a character’s self-realization at the end of the narrative. One critic has suggested that the concept is the basis of an overall narrative strategy, “the commonplace things of Dublin [becoming] embodiments or symbols . . . of paralysis.” [24] A later critic, avoiding the term “epiphany,” but apparently not the concept, has examined in considerable detail how “church and state manifest themselves in Dubliners” as agents of paralysis. [25] There are numerous such “manifestations.” [26]

What immediately distinguishes the stories from Joyce's later works is their apparent simplicity and transparency. Some critics have been led into drawing facile conclusions. The stories have been pigeonholed, seen as realist or naturalist, or instead labeled symbolist. [27] [28] The term "epiphany" has been taken as synonymous with symbol. [29] Critical analysis of elements of stories or stories in their entirety has been problematic. Dubliners may have occasioned more conflicting interpretations than any other modern literary work. [30]

It's been said that Dubliners is unique, defying any form of classification, and perhaps no interpretation can ever be conclusive. The only certainty is that it's a "masterpiece" in its own right and "a significant stepping-stone . . . into the modernist structure of Joyce's mature work". [31]

Media adaptations

Related Research Articles

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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known 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 other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

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"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.

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Richard David Ellmann, FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

"Eveline" is a short story by the Irish writer James Joyce. It was first published in 1904 by the journal Irish Homestead and later featured in his 1914 collection of short stories Dubliners. It tells the story of Eveline, a teenager who plans to leave Dublin for Argentina with her "lover".

"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story traces a young boy's infatuation with his friend's sister.

"The Sisters" is a short story by James Joyce, the first of a series of short stories called Dubliners. Originally published in the Irish Homestead on 13 August 1904, "The Sisters" was Joyce's first published work of fiction. Joyce later revised the story and had it, along with the rest of the series, published in book form in 1914. The story details a boy's connection with a local priest, in the context of the priest's death and reputation.

"An Encounter" is a short story by James Joyce. It is second in a collection of Joyce's short stories called Dubliners. In the story, two young boys experience an eerie encounter with a strange, old man. It deals with themes such as routine and wanderlust.

"Clay" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. It deals with the reflections of a middle-aged, unmarried woman during the course of her day.

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"Two Gallants" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. It tells the story of two Irishmen who are frustrated with their lack of achievement in life and rely on the exploitation of others to live. Joyce considered the story to be one of the most important in Dubliners.

Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. The term has a more specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction. Author James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero (1904–1906), an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." Stephen's epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception in the trivial aspects of everyday Dublin life, non-religious and non-mystical in nature. They become the basis of Stephen's theory of aesthetic perception as well as his writing. In similar terms, Joyce experimented with epiphany throughout his career, from the short stories he wrote between 1898 and 1904 which were central to his early work, to his late novel Finnegans Wake (1939). Scholars used Joyce's term to describe a common feature of the modernist novel, with authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Katherine Mansfield all featuring these sudden moments of vision as an aspect of the contemporary mind. Joycean or modernist epiphany has its roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially the Wordsworthian "spots of time," as well as the sudden spiritual insights that formed the basis of traditional spiritual autobiography. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the rise of epiphany in modernist art as a reaction against the rise of a “commercial-industrial-capitalist society” during the early twentieth century.

<i>Araby</i> (1999 film) 1999 American film

Araby is an independent short film directed by Dennis Courtney, starring Van Hughes. It was adapted from the short story "Araby" by James Joyce, which was included in his short works collection Dubliners.

Amalia Popper was the first Italian translator of James Joyce's works and author of his first biography, published as an introduction to his translation of Dubliners, published in 1935 in Trieste under the title "Araby".

References

  1. Osteen, Mark (22 June 1995). "A Splendid Bazaar: The Shopper Guide to the New Dubliners". Studies in Short Fiction.
  2. Curran, C. P. (1968). James Joyce Remembered. New York and London: Oxford University Press. p. 49. ISBN   0192111795 . Retrieved 16 February 2024. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.
  3. Gilbert, Stuart (1957). Letters of James Joyce. New York: The Viking Press. pp. 63–64. Retrieved 21 February 2024. It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.
  4. Gilbert 1957, pp. 62–63: I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation in my country
  5. Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 216. Retrieved 1 March 2024. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.
  6. Ellmann, Richard (1966). Letters of James Joyce Volume II. London: Faber and Faber. p. 134. Retrieved 16 February 2024.
  7. Michael Groden. "Notes on James Joyce's Ulysses". The University of Western Ontario. Archived from the original on 1 November 2005.
  8. Jeri Johnson, "Composition and Publication History", in James Joyce, Dubliners (Oxford University Press, 2000).
  9. Schneider, Ulrich (1998). ReJoycing: New Readings of "Dubliners". The University of Kentucky Press. pp. 105–205. ISBN   0813109493 . Retrieved 29 February 2024.
  10. Atherton 1966, p. 44.
  11. Joyce, James (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. B. W. Huebsch. p. 252. Retrieved 18 February 2024. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak… The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
  12. Ellmann, Richard (1966). Letters of James Joyce Volume II. London: Faber and Faber. p. 135. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  13. Tindall, William York (1959). A Reader's Guide to James Joyce. London: Thames and Hudson. pp. 12–13. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  14. Ellmann, Richard (1982). James Joyce (Rev ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 88. ISBN   0195031032 . Retrieved 16 February 2024.
  15. Bonapfel, Elizabeth M. (2014). “Marking Realism in Dubliners.” Doubtful Points: Joyce and Punctuation. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. pp. 67–86. ISBN   978-90-420-3901-8 . Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  16. Atherton 1966, p. 48.
  17. Bonapfel 2014, pp. 81, 85.
  18. Tindall 1959, pp. 6–7.
  19. Atherton 1966, pp. 29–30.
  20. Pound, Ezra (1935). “Dubliners and Mr James Joyce," Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber. p. 401. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  21. Atherton 1966, p. 34.
  22. Ellmann, Richard (1982). James Joyce (Revised ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 661 n.62. ISBN   0195033817 . Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  23. Joyce, James (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B. W. Huebsch. p. 260. Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  24. Tindall 1959, p. 12.
  25. Williams, Trevor L. (1998). “No Cheer for ‘the Gratefully Oppressed’: Ideology in Joyce’s Dubliners.” ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners. p. 91. Retrieved 5 March 2024.
  26. Williams 1998, pp. 87–109.
  27. Tindall 1959, pp. 8–10.
  28. Basic, Sonja (1998). "A Book o Many Uncertainties: Joyce's Dubliners." ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners. The University Press of Kentucky. p. 13. ISBN   9780813182797 . Retrieved 6 March 2024.
  29. Tindall 1959, pp. 10–12.
  30. Basic 1998, pp. 13–14.
  31. Basic 1998, p. 36.
  32. "PlayographyIreland – Dublin One". irishplayography.com.
  33. Alan Warren Friedman (2007). Party pieces: oral storytelling and social performance in Joyce and Beckett. Syracuse University Press. p. 232. ISBN   9780815631484.
  34. "Rea reads The Dead on RTÉ Radio". RTÉ Ten. Raidió Teilifís Éireann. 2 April 2012. Retrieved 2 April 2012.
  35. "New film to mark 'Dubliners' centenary". Irish Times.
  36. "Album Review: Hibsen, The Stern Task of Living". Hot Press.

Further reading

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Dubliners