Dubliners (Hardbound - 2022)

Dubliners is one of the most magnificent short story collections in the English language. The manuscript was sent to the English publisher, Grant Richards in late 1905. After initial enthusiasm for the book, Richards became uncomfortable about sexual explicitness and possible legal implications which could result from this. In 1909 Joyce stopped persuading Grant Richards for publication of the book and sent it to the Irish publisher, Maunsel & Company. There the book was printed, but the stock was destroyed before its release fearing libel action. Ultimately the book was printed and released by Grant Richards in 1914.

In Dubliners, Joyce portrays the denizens of the city of his birth, from the young boy facing death in the first story, "The Sisters", to the middle-aged Gabriel of the haunting final story, "The Dead". He rebels against social and literary conventions, against Catholicism, and against Dublin, the city at the centre of this excellent collection of stories.

James Joyce (Augustine Aloysius) 1882-1941, Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet, was born in Dublin on 2 February, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family which, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. In spite of poverty, he was educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin, where he showed his exceptional talent. In 1902, after graduation, he went to Paris with the intention of attending medical school there. But he soon gave up attending lectures and spent his time in writing poems and prose sketches, and formulating an ‘aesthetic system’.

He returned to Dublin on his mother’s death in 1903 and in 1904 he met Nora Barnacle with whom he lived for the whole of his life and ultimately married in 1931. They had two children, a son and a daughter. They lived at Trieste and Zurich, and settled finally after the War in Paris. With the outbreak of the World War II the family returned to Switzerland where Joyce died on 13 January 1941.

Joyce’s first book, the poems of Chamber Music, was published in London in 1907, and Dubliners, a book of stories, in 1914. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in 1916. It was followed by Exiles, a play, in 1918. Ulysses, published in 1922, brought him international fame. Finnegans Wake was published in 1939. The last two works were viewed by many writers and critics as modern masterpieces (notably by T.S. Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Hemingway and Arnold Bennett). Joyce’s influence on the development of modernism (especially stream of consciousness) is unchallenged.