Epiphany in Dubliners

Essay by samirkarmakarUniversity, Bachelor'sD+, May 2005

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Introduction:

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist and poet, whose psychological perceptions and innovative literary techniques make him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, the son of a poverty-stricken civil servant. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including University College, Dublin. Though being raised in the Roman Catholic faith, he broke with the church while he was in college. In 1904 he left Dublin with Nora Barnacle, whom he eventually married. They with their two children lived in Trieste, Italy, in Paris, and in Zurich, Switzerland, meagerly supported by Joyce's jobs as a language instructor and by gifts from patrons. In 1907 Joyce suffered an attack of iritis, the first of the severe eye troubles that led to near blindness. After 20 years in Paris, early in World War II, when the Germans invaded France, Joyce moved to Zurich, where he died on January 13, 1941.

Literary works of James Joyce

Joyce published his first book, Chamber Music (1907), consists of 36 highly finished love poems, which reflect the influence of the Elizabethan lyricists and the English lyric poets of the 1890s. In his second work, Dubliners (1914), a collection of 15 short stories, Joyce dealt with crucial episodes of childhood and adolescence and of family and public life in Dublin, and it is the radical literary shift where Joyce denounced the Victorian style. His A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is largely autobiographical, recreating his youth and home life in the story of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. In this work Joyce made considerable use of the stream-of-consciousness, or interior-monologue, technique, a literary device that interprets all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of a character with scrupulous psychological realism. Another early work...