| "Grace" | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Short story by James Joyce | |||
| Country | Ireland | ||
| Language | English | ||
| Genre(s) | short story | ||
| Publication | |||
| Published in | Dubliners | ||
| Publication type | Collection | ||
| Media type | |||
| Publication date | 1914 | ||
| Chronology | |||
| |||
" Grace " is a short story by James Joyce written toward the end of 1905 [1] and published in his 1914 collection Dubliners .
The story begins with a man unconscious after falling down the stairs in a pub after heavy drinking. A friend of his, Mr. Power, finds him, reveals he is named Tom Kernan, and takes him home to his wife. Kernan is a salesman who once possessed an easy charm and manner but has since descended into alcoholism. An injury to his tongue sustained during the fall keeps Kernan in bed.
Two days later, he is visited by his friends Power, M'Coy, and Cunningham. The friends have concocted a plan to get Kernan to attend a Catholic retreat with them. The four discuss many matters and finally settle upon religion. The friends mention attending a confessional retreat at a Jesuit church and invite Kernan along. He does not respond to the idea at first. The conversation shows a superficial understanding of the Catholic faith, and the friends make many comical errors about the Church.
The scene shifts to the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street where all listen to a priest's sermon.
Kernan's gin-drinking in the novel Ulysses (which is set on 16 June 1904) indicates the failure of his friends' plan. Hugh Kenner found "Grace" "as subversive a story as any Dubliners contains: the story against which Irish Catholic opinion should have expended its animus". [2] According to Stanislaus Joyce, the three parts of the story recall the tripartite structure of Dante's Divine Comedy ("inferno-purgatorio-paradiso"). [3] The word "grace" is used in each part, but not in the religious sense until the last sentence of the story, and it has been argued that Joyce initially suppresses the doctrine only to have it equated with a business practice by a priest in a church, to ridicule the belief that divine grace is available there. [4]
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.
Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement." According to the writer Declan Kiberd, "before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking."
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and as a major character in his 1922 novel Ulysses. Stephen mirrors many facets of Joyce's own life and personality. Joyce was a talented singer, for example, and in Ulysses Leopold Bloom notes the excellence of Stephen's tenor voice after hearing him sing Johannes Jeep's song "Von der Sirenen Listigkeit".
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
James Aloysius Cullen was an Irish Catholic priest who founded the Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart and the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association (PTAA)
"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.
"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.
Davy Byrne's pub is a public house located at 21 Duke Street, Dublin. It was made famous by its appearance in Chapter 8 ('Lestrygonians') of James Joyce's 1922 modernist novel Ulysses, set on Thursday 16 June 1904. The main character, advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, stops at just before 2 pm for a gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard and a glass of burgundy while wandering through Dublin.
"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.
"The Boarding House" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners.
"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.
"A Painful Case" is a short story by Irish author James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story details a platonic affair between an isolated man and a married woman, the breaking off of the affair, and its aftermath.
"Ivy Day in the Committee Room" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. Taking place in a political party office after a day of canvassing, the story depicts various campaigners discussing the political candidates and issues of Irish nationalism and Home Rule. "Ivy Day" refers to an Irish holiday that commemorated Charles Stewart Parnell, an important Irish nationalist figure.
Saint Francis Xavier Church, popularly known as Gardiner Street Church, is a Catholic church on Upper Gardiner Street near Mountjoy Square in Dublin, Ireland. The church is run by the Jesuits.
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.
Uncle Charles Principle, according to Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner, is a narrative procedure used by Irish writer James Joyce in several of his books. In his study Joyce's Voices, Kenner analyzes in depth the use of this technique throughout the novel Ulysses. Joyce uses the "Uncle Charles Principle" to represent two roles in the novel, that of its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and that of the classic literary narrator. The procedure, however, receives his name from a character from another Joyce's novel: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce acknowledged having beem inspired by the work Les Lauriers Sont Coupés by the French writer Édouard Dujardin.
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