"The Boarding House" | |||
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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 | |||
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"The Boarding House" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners.
Characters
Mrs. Mooney looks forward to her confrontation, which she intends to "win" by defending her daughter's honor and convincing Mr. Doran to offer his hand in marriage. Waiting for the time to pass, Mrs. Mooney figures the odds are in her favor, considering that Mr. Doran, who has worked for a wine merchant for thirteen years and garnered much respect, will choose the option that least harms his career.
Meanwhile, Mr. Doran anguishes over the impending meeting with Mrs. Mooney. As he clumsily grooms himself for the appointment, he reviews the difficult confession to his priest that he made on Saturday evening, in which he was harshly reproved for his romantic affair. He knows he can either marry Polly or run away, the latter an option that would ruin his sound reputation. Convincing himself that he has been duped, Mr. Doran bemoans Polly's unimpressive family, her ill manners, and her poor grammar, and wonders how he can remain free and unmarried. In this vexed moment Polly enters the room and threatens to end her life out of unhappiness. In her presence, Mr. Doran begins to remember how he was bewitched by Polly's beauty and kindness, but he still wavers about his decision.
Bob Doran's subsequent annual drinking binge is referred to several times in Ulysses. [2]
It is noted that one of the songs Polly sings is "I'm a naughty girl", [3] which Joyce scholar Zack Bowen suggested foreshadows Polly's affair with Mr. Doran. [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. Partially serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, 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".
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 debut 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).
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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"A Mother" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story centers around a mother who secures a role for her daughter in a series of concerts.
"Grace" is a short story by James Joyce written toward the end of 1905 and published in his 1914 collection Dubliners.
Fanny by Gaslight is a 1944 British drama film, directed by Anthony Asquith and produced by Gainsborough Pictures, set in the 1870s and adapted from a 1940 novel by Michael Sadleir.
The Lily of Killarney is an opera in three acts by Julius Benedict. The libretto, by John Oxenford and Dion Boucicault, is based on Boucicault's own play The Colleen Bawn. The opera received its premiere at Covent Garden Theatre, London on Monday 10 February 1862.
David Sheehy was an Irish nationalist politician. He was a member of parliament (MP) from 1885 to 1900 and from 1903 to 1918, taking his seat as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
"Oh! Mr Porter" is an old British music hall song about a girl who has got on the wrong train. It was famously part of the repertoires of the artistes Norah Blaney and Marie Lloyd. It was written in 1892 by George Le Brunn and his brother Thomas, and taken on an extended provincial tour that same year by Marie Lloyd. The lyrics include this chorus:
"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.
Fleet Street is a street on the southside of Dublin, Ireland. Located in the Dublin 2 area, Fleet Street runs eastwards, parallel to the River Liffey, through Temple Bar, across Westmoreland Street to D'Olier Street.