Examines the lives and careers of four distinguished Irish authors and analyzes the connections among them.

Dubliners is a collection of picturesque short stories that paint a portrait of life in middle-class Dublin in the early 20th century. Joyce, a Dublin native, was careful to use actual locations and settings in the city, as well as language and slang in use at the time, to make the stories directly relatable to those who lived there. The collection had a rocky publication history, with the stories being initially rejected over eighteen times before being provisionally accepted by a publisher—then later rejected again, multiple times. It took Joyce nine years to finally see his stories in print, but not before seeing a printer burn all but one copy of the proofs. Today Dubliners survives as a rich example of not just literary excellence, but of what everyday life was like for average Dubliners in their day. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

A splendid collection of literary essays by "the greatest biographer of the century"--The Sunday Times, London. Ellmann's Oscar Wilde was a tremendous critical success, winning both the NBCC and the Pulitzer Prize last year.

Declared by their author to be a chapter in the moral history of Ireland, this much-acclaimed collection of 15 tales features timeless insights into the human condition. A fine and accessible introduction to the work of one of the 20th-century's most influential writers, it includes a masterpiece of the short-story genre, "The Dead."

This group of fifteen brief narratives connected by a place and a time—the city of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century—was written when James Joyce was a precocious young graduate of University College. With great subtlety and artistic restraint, Joyce suggests what lies beneath the pieties of Dublin society and its surface drive for respectability, suggesting the difficulties and despairs that were being endured on a daily basis in the homes, pubs, streets, and offices of the city: underemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, poverty, hunger, emotional and sexual repression. No writer ever took more seriously the details, history, and culture of a particular place than Joyce did with his home city, and these stories combine dark humor with compassion and a searching eye for the causes of suffering. This new edition’s historical appendices include contemporary reviews (among them one by Ezra Pound) and materials on religion, the struggle for Irish independence, and Dublin’s musical and performance culture.

The harvest of a long and deep acquaintance with Joyce's fifteen enigmatic stories of Dublin life, Narrative Con/Texts in "Dubliners" creatively widens the definition of "context" to include networks of theme and symbol. By treating Dubliners as an expanding document of lives in the process of being lived and by paying attention to how the boundaries between stories break down, Benstock is able to notice how characters and situations come uncannily to resemble each other. There are several innovative approaches here (for example, the thorough inspection of the economic conditions of Joyce's Dublin, down to the halfpenny) as well as new twists on established ideas. Benstock attempts a global, integrated reading of the stories, substituting his more holistic "con/texts" for the current fashion of context-hunting. His is an old ambition (for full coverage) in a new, upbeat format.