Dubliners

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Stories about the collective struggle of the Irish working class—one of the world's most compelling portraits of urban life.

"When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years," James Joyce once wrote to his brother, "that it is the 'second city' of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world." Dubliners , completed when James Joyce was only twenty-five, is the first of his works to demonstrate the unique, innovative style that would make him one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. Joyce turns his discerning eye to Dublin's lower middle class—to the petit-bourgeois world of shopkeepers, tradesmen, functionaries, and clerks. The result is a portrait of Dublin life in the early 1900s, an undisputed masterpiece of human experience played out against a defeated city.

This edition
-A concise introduction that gives readers important background information
-A chronology of the author's life and work
-A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context
-An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations
-Detailed explanatory notes
-Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work
-Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction
-A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience

Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.

294 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 15,1914

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This edition

Format
294 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published
July 1, 2005 by Simon \u0026 Schuster
ISBN
9781416500353
ASIN
1416500359
Language
English
Characters More characters
  • Maria

    Maria

    Robert Jordans young lover.more...

  • Bantam Lyons

    Bantam Lyons

    Lyons also appears as a character in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" in Joyces Dubliners. In Ulysses, he appears briefly in "Lotus-Eaters." Bloom tries to give him a throwaway paper that he has been handed, and Lyons mistakes it for a ti...

  • John Corley

    John Corley

    A young man who features in Ulysses and the Dubliners story Two Gallants.He was the eldest son of Inspector Corley of the G Division, lately deceased, who had married a certain Katherine Brophy, the daughter of a Louth farmer."Step...

  • Fr. Flynn

    Fr. Flynn

    ...

  • Jimmy Doyle
  • Matthew Lenehan

    Matthew Lenehan

    Lenehan appeared earlier in Joyces work, as a character in the Dubliners story "Two Gallants". Here, he comes off as something of a simpleton. He cracks jokes amongst the men, and follows Boylan around, but no one pays him much mind. Lenehan also se...

About the author

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A profound influence of literary innovations of Irish writer James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on modern fiction includes his works, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.

People note this novelist for his experimental use of language in these works. Technical innovations of Joyce in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels, drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and he created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.

John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.

Jesuits at Clongowes Wood college, Clane, and then Belvedere college in Dublin educated Joyce from the age of six years; he graduated in 1897. In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce published first an essay on When We Dead Awaken, play of Heinrich Ibsen, in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time, he also began writing lyric poems.

After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, as a teacher, and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, and when a telegram about his dying mother arrived, he returned. Not long after her death, Joyce traveled again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, whom he married in 1931.

Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music.

At the outset of the Great War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich, Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933.

In March 1923, Joyce in Paris started Finnegans Wake, his second major work; glaucoma caused chronic eye troubles that he suffered at the same time. Transatlantic review of Ford Madox Ford in April 1924 carried the first segment of the novel, called part of Work in Progress. He published the final version in 1939.

Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.

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