James Joyce's Dubliner is a work both intensely local and broadly cosmopolitan. It lies open to reading as a collection of stories challenging every theme and every convention of earlier Irish literature and as a book rooted in the continental fiction of Joyce's day but branching and blossoming into the world of colonial and post-colonial literature.

With the abolition of its parliament in 18oo and the Act of Union the following year, Ireland ceased to be a separate but subjugated kingdom whose monarch was the king or queen of Britain. From 18o1 to 1921, all thirty-two of its counties were linked with the islands to its east in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. ……

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people simply striving to get by. In every sense an international figure,Joyce was faithful to his own country by seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature.

The Sisters

An Encounter

Araby

Eveline

Afer the Race

Two Gallants

The Boarding House

A Little Cloud

Counterparts

Clay

A Painful Case

Ivy Day in the Committee Room

A Mother

Grace

The Dead

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