About the Author

James Joyce was one of the most celebrated and influential English-language writers of the 20th century, and his later works of fiction, Ulysses (1922) and […]

Overview

Dubliners is a short-story cycle, but unlike other such cycles, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), for instance, or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, its […]

Setting

The title of the volume immediately draws our attention to the importance of the setting-both place and time unites these diverse stories. Joyce creates a […]

Themes and Characters

While there are no recurring characters in Dubliners, Joyce does appear to have envisioned the collection as a single work that would expose the city’s […]

Literary Qualities

Discussions of Joyce’s earlier fiction, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, frequently center on those moments in which characters achieve […]

Social Sensitivity

In a 1905 letter to Grant Richards, Joyce related his surprise that “no artist has given Dublin to the world,” despite its antiquity, its size, […]

Topics for Discussion

1. Only the first three stories in the collection, the ones dealing with childhood, have first-person narrators; the remainder are told in the third-person. Why […]