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."
Richard Ellmann's scholarly work is notable for its striking liveliness and clarity and its genuine illumination of the writers and works with which he dealt. His life of James Joyce, published in 1959, received more commendation and critical praise than any previous literary biography.
"While all other European nations increased in population during the [nineteenth] century, the population of Ireland decreased at every census except one between 1841 and 1961; the number of persons living in Ireland in 1966 was less than half that of 1841. Of all Western European countries, Ireland has the greatest amount of postponed marriage and permanent celibacy, and yet it also has the highest marital fertility rate ... It is unsettling to social scientists to admit the existence of an apparent exception to so many well known and widely accepted theories concerning population growth, urbanization, emigration, age and marriage, and family size. The aim of this book is to distinguish some of the more interesting elements of Irish life which are indeed peculiar to Ireland from those which Ireland shares, to a greater or lesser degree, with other countries"--
Irish literature's roots have been traced to the 7th-9th century. This is a rich and hardy literature starting with descriptions of the brave deeds of kings, saints and other heroes. These were followed by generous veins of religious, historical, genealogical, scientific and other works. The development of prose, poetry and drama raced along with the times. Modern, well-known Irish writers include: William Yeats, James Joyce, Sean Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Synge and Samuel Beckett.
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.
This work examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis, London-Paris-New York, that marks the intersection between western thinking about the City and the advent of literary modernism.