![]() Dubliners is now widely regarded as a seminal collection of modern short stories. It caused controversy when it first appeared, and was the first of many of Joyce’s works to be banned in his native country. The collection ends with the most famous of all Joyce’s stories – ‘The Dead’. This collection of vignettes features both real and imaginary figures in Dublin life around the turn of the century. Like other modernists, such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Joyce minimised the dramatic element of the short story in favour of symbolic meaning and a more static aesthetic. What remains is a sparse yet lyrical exposure of small moments of revelation – which he called ‘epiphanies’. Joyce’s writing was also considered quite scandalous when it first appeared, because it is critical of religion and frank about sexual matters.ĭubliners is his first major work – a ground-breaking collection of short stories in which he strips away all the decorations and flourishes of late Victorian prose style. Be prepared to extend the range of your vocabulary, to discover prose blended with poetry, and to encounter amazingly inventive word-play in the later work. His early writing is simple and easy to understand, then it gradually becomes more complex as he experimented with the possibilities of language. If you read Joyce’s work in the same order that he wrote it, the sequence forms a perfect James Joyce tutorial. An introduction to the major stories and novels ![]()
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