About the Author
James Joyce was one of the most celebrated and influential English-language writers of the 20th century, and his later works of fiction, Ulysses (1922) and […]
Dubliners
Setting
The title of the volume immediately draws our attention to the importance of the setting-both place and time unites these diverse stories. Joyce creates a […]
Themes and Characters
While there are no recurring characters in Dubliners, Joyce does appear to have envisioned the collection as a single work that would expose the city’s […]
Literary Qualities
Discussions of Joyce’s earlier fiction, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, frequently center on those moments in which characters achieve […]
Social Sensitivity
In a 1905 letter to Grant Richards, Joyce related his surprise that “no artist has given Dublin to the world,” despite its antiquity, its size, […]
Topics for Discussion
1. Only the first three stories in the collection, the ones dealing with childhood, have first-person narrators; the remainder are told in the third-person. Why […]
Ideas for Reports and Papers
1. The titles of the stories are not always straightforward descriptions of their contents, but they are often suggestive and worthy of careful consideration. Consider […]
Related Titles and Adaptations
One well-known American work that bears comparison with Dubliners is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of short stories based on the author’s experiences […]