Dubliners

Colophon

Author: James Joyce

Cover design: Grant Richards

Desktop publishing: Lars Remer

Printing: Pumbo BV

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Printed in the Netherlands

Dubliners depicts middle-class life in Dublin at the start of the twentieth century. Themes within the stories include the disappointments of childhood, the frustrations of adolescence, and the importance of adolescent awakening.

James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years of struggle with publishers, resisting literary innovation and their demands to remove inappropriate words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories.

When James Joyce signed his first publishing contract for the book he already knew its literary worth and to alter it in any way would retard the course of civilisation in Ireland.

James Joyce's aim was to tell the truth, to create a work of art that would reflect everyday life in Ireland at the turn of the last century and by rejecting euphemism, reveal to the Irish the unromantic reality the recognition of which would lead to the spiritual liberation of his country.

Each of the fifteen stories offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Dubliners such as a death, an encounter, an opportunity not taken, a memory rekindled and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation.

Considered at the time as a literary experiment, Dubliners contains moments of joy, fear, grief, love and loss, which combine to form one of the most complete depictions of a city ever written, and the stories remain as refreshingly original and surprising in this century as they did in the last.