This distraction can prevent them from appreciating Dubliners' deeper, more universal themes. To this day, despite a more liberal attitude in art and entertainment regarding the issues dramatized in the book (premarital sex, for instance, is hardly the taboo it was when "The Boarding House" appeared), many first-time readers are distracted by the unsavory surface details of nearly all the stories. In contrast to his status-conscious character Gabriel Conroy, James Joyce rejected good taste - one of the characteristics that mark his art as Modern.Ī precedent existed for Joyce's warts-and-all approach, in the nineteenth-century French school of writing known as Naturalism, but no writer had ever been quite as explicit, or as relentlessly downbeat, as Joyce in Dubliners. Disrespectful dialogue about the king of England, and even the use of the mild British oath "bloody," were thought by many to go beyond the bounds of good taste - and they did. (In the past, fiction writers had almost invariably changed the names of their short-story and novel settings, or discretely left them out altogether.) In fact, including these details delayed publication of the book by years, as potential publishers and printers feared lawsuits by those businesses mentioned by name. The use throughout of the names of Dublin streets and parks - and especially shops, pubs, and railway companies - was seen as scandalous, too. The collection all but overflows with unattractive human behavior: simony, truancy, pederasty, drunkenness (all of them in the first three stories alone!), child and spousal abuse, gambling, prostitution, petty thievery, blackmail, and suicide. This is in line with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.Even before its London publication in 1914, James Joyce's Dubliners caused considerable controversy due to the material in the stories that was obvious and accessible, available to even the most casual readers and reviewers.
The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses.
They centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. 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. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. Download cover art Download CD case insert Dubliners (Version 2)ĭubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.
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