JAMES JOYCE (1882 – 1941)

 James Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. After a very
traditional Jesuit education, he decided not to enter the Order as his family
expected, but to study modern languages at University College, Dublin,
instead.
 After the degree in 1902 he went to live on the Continent, where he remained
for the rest of his life.
 From 1904 he worked in Trieste as a teacher of English. With him was Nora
Barnacle. It was in this period that he wrote Dubliners (published in 1915)and
A portrait of the artist as a young man. Since 1914 he had been composing
Ulysses which was published later. In 1939 appeared Finnegan’s wake which
Joyce considered his masterpiece.
 When the German Army occupied Paris in 1940 he decided to leave the city,
moving to Switzerland, where he died in 1941.

Dubliners is a collection of 15 stories, each a portrait of a character living in Dublin.

The stories are all about failure of one sort or another and, although very realistic in
detail, everyone contains a symbolic element which connects it to the others. Joyce
said that his intention in Dubliners had been “to write a moral history of Ireland”, in
fact, the characters are representative not only of the people of Dublin or Ireland but
also of mankind in general.