James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and died in Zurich in 1941 after one of the most controversial and luminous literary careers of the twentieth century. From his early work, the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short stories collected in Dubliners, to his later masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, Joyce forged a brilliant, adaptable prose that could be, by turns, graceful, shocking, intimate, and difficult.
             At the time Dubliners was written, Ireland was in a deep political turmoil following the death of Charles Stuart Parnell, the Nationalist political leader who had rallied much of the country in support of Irish independence from Britain. After Parnell's disgrace--he was caught in an affair with a married woman--and subsequent death, the country was left reeling and sharply divided between Protestants and Catholics, Conservatives and Nationalists. Joyce perceived exhaustion, emptiness, and numbness in his native city, and he set out to expose these qualities in the stories of Dubliners, hoping the book would give the Irish "one good look at themselves."
             Each of the stories in Dubliners offers a brief window into the most intimate lives of a wide variety of characters, many of whom have nothing in common beyond their Irishness and their presence in Dublin. Men and women of all ages, occupations, and social classes are represented. But looking upon this wide variety of characters, a number of common themes and concerns gradually emerge; these themes and concerns give structure to many of the stories and govern the book as a whole.
             Dubliners is about the ways in which people attempt to escape from numbness and inertia and about the moments of painful self-realization that often follow those attempts. It treats the encounter between generations, and, finally, between the living and the dead; it turns over religion, art, and politics; it captures the awakenings of love in t...