Dubliners

Dubliners was written between 1904 and 1907 and published in 1914, after years of argument with publishers. James Joyce was in his twenties when he began it, living in Dublin and then in Trieste and Rome, and the delay came from what the book would not alter: real place names, the language his characters speak, and stories a printer objected to. The collection of fifteen stories was, in his own account, a way of holding a polished mirror up to the city he had left, and he described its purpose as the spiritual liberation of Ireland.

The arrangement is deliberate. The opening stories are told by children, the ones that follow are told in the third person about progressively older people, and the last, 'The Dead', is a longer piece set at a Christmas party. Joyce described that division as childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories share a habit of ending on a moment in which a character sees their own situation clearly for an instant, which is the technique readers most associate with the book.

The city is the subject as much as the plot is: streets, shops, offices, churches, the politics of the period and the paralysis Joyce thought he saw in Dublin life. Many of the characters reappear in small parts in Ulysses, and this collection is usually the first book people read by Joyce because its prose is far more direct than the novels that followed. It is treated in most accounts of the twentieth-century short story as a turning point.