LITERATURE
James Joyce, Dubliners: Introduction and Analysis
Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories written by James Joyce and published in 1914. As we’ve remarked before, Dubliners is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature, but initially sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself).
We’ve analysed a number of the most popular and widely studied stories in Dubliners in separate posts (see the links provided below), but in this post we want to provide a brief overview to each of the 15 stories. Joyce largely ordered the stories so their principal characters gradually get older, so we move from late childhood/early adulthood into young adulthood and then middle age, through to late middle age in the final story.