James [Augustine Aloysius] Joyce (1882-1941) was born in Rathgar, Dublin, being the eldest of eleven children to May [Mary Jane, née Murray] and John Stanislaus Joyce. The latter, who figures in his son’s books as Simon Dedalus, was a middle-class Catholic descended from the Norman Joyces of Galway, who inherited some income and property in Cork which he dissipated. After the loss of a government post in the Rates Collector’s office, he presided over the increasingly necessitous removals of his family through fourteen rented homes in Dublin between James’s birth and his eventual departure from Ireland in 1904. His acid wit, love of music, drinking habits, and anti-clericism, were all influences on his son’s character. May Joyce, a devout Catholic who was ten years younger than her husband, endured fifteen pregnancies in almost as many years, and died of cancer in 1903, an event that haunts Stephen Dedalus throughout Ulysses. Joyce was sent to Clongowes Wood, the Jesuit school, in 1888, and then briefly attended the Christian Brothers in 1892 when his father could no longer meet the fees. It was during this period that he wrote at the age of nine his first known piece, ‘Et Tu Healy’, a poem excoriating Tim Healy, the Irish Parliamentary Party leader in the split from Charles Stewart Parnell, a hero of Joyce’s father - who, by his own account, sent a printed copy to the Pope. In 1893 Joyce was admitted to Belvedere College, the Jesuit Dublin day-school, as a non-paying student. Becoming a prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, he was encouraged to accept a religious vocation, but rejected the Director’s invitation to join the Jesuit Order. Instead, he turned increasingly to literature as an alternative to religion.

In 1895, he entered the Royal University at St. Stephen’s Green [see universities] on a scholarship, and there studied languages together with the mandatory courses in mathematics and philosophy, though largely conducting his own education using the National Library and the book-barrows as well as the antiquarian collection at Marsh’s Library. At college, he continued a schoolboy friendship with Richard Sheehy, whose sister Mary is thought to have been the original for Emma Clery in Stephen Hero (1944) and E.C. in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). He also made the acquaintance of Vincent Cosgrave (‘Lynch’), John Francis Byrne (‘Cranly’), and George Clancy (‘Davin’), who were to provide foils to Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait and Ulysses (1922). In his last college year he confessed his apostasy to close friends and to his mother, who was deeply distressed by it.

While a student, Joyce described himself as a poet and an artist. Between 1899 and 1903 he gathered his early lyrics as Moods and Shine and Dark, lost collections from which a few poems have survived only because his brother Stanislaus [Joyce] used the sheets as a commonplace book. A later collection made in 1904 and called Chamber Music was published in 1907, by which time Joyce had so lost interest in it that he allowed Stanislaus to dictate the sequence. The fin de siecle aestheticism of these delicate songs - consciously adhering to Elizabethan models - was modified by Joyce’s awareness of the symbolist movement. Pomes Penyeach, a subsequent collection which appeared in 1927, includes as its first piece the poem ‘Tilly’, written in 1904, expressing his feelings at his mother’s death. He began to write prose sketches in 1900 with the composition of epiphanies, being short writings either in the form of dramatic vignettes or prose-poems intended as succinct ‘manifestations’ of the falsehood and hypocrisy that he detected in others, and exact records of vivid ‘phases’ in his own mental life. These short notations were first circulated by him in manuscript, but later used to indicate moments of heightened perception in the novels from Stephen Hero to Ulysses.

On 20 January 1900, Joyce read a paper before to the Literary and Historical Society at the university entitled ‘Drama and Life’, to be followed soon by an article on ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, which was published in the prestigious Fortnightly Review (1 April 1900). The Ibsen essay, for which he was paid enough to take his father on a music-hall spree in London, was noticed by the dramatist himself, who conveyed thanks through his English translator William Archer. After a hasty study of Norwegian, Joyce responded by writing to Ibsen in March 1901, ending with the assertion that ‘higher and holier enlightenment lies - onward’. A broadside against the Irish Literary Theatre [Abbey Theatre], attacking W. B. Yeats and the other leaders of the dramatic movement for ‘surrender[ing] to the popular will’ of an increasingly nationalistic and pietistic Ireland, appeared as ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ (1901), printed privately with a feminist tract by Francis Skeffington. An address on ‘James Clarence Mangan’ in 1902, celebrated the imaginative personality of the artist whom he saw as the last in an Irish tradition of sorrowful poetry, while disparaging the nationalist emotions which dominate his writing. These early papers, extensively embodied in Stephen Hero, represent the cornerstones of Joyce’s aesthetic philosophy, while ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’ and a second paper on Mangan, both delivered in Trieste in 1907, formulate the outlook towards Irish culture and society that pervades his later works.

On completion of his degree, Joyce met and felt himself rebuffed by leaders of the Irish literary revival, initiating a relationship fraught with difficulties. He admired Yeats sufficiently to memorize the entire text of ‘The Tables of the Law’, which he recited to George Russell, but Yeats and Russell agreed in finding him conceited. His refusal to accept the Irish-Ireland policies of Catholic nationalism promoted by D. P. Moran and Arthur Griffith (whose editorials in the United Irishman he remarked on scathingly), increased his isolation. His antipathy to Patrick Pearse soon took the form of a satirical sketch of an Irish language class given a Mr Hughes in Stephen Hero - the novel where, in 1904, he set about marshalling his arguments against simplistic views of Irishness, sexuality, and politics, writing with particular venom on power of Catholicism, whose clergy he compared to ‘tyrannous lice’.

n 1902 the problem of making a living led him to follow the example of Oliver St. John Gogarty (whom he had met at the counter of the National Library) in opting for medicine. After first enrolling at the medical school of the Royal University, he left Dublin for Paris on 1 December 1902 with a view to training there instead, but encountered difficulties over entrance qualifications. Impecunious and homesick, he returned for Christmas, but left again on 23 January 1903, to be recalled by a telegram in August informing him of his mother’s impending death. During this second Parisian sojourn he read Aristotle in a French translation and explored the works of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Libraire Ste. Genevieve, developing the analysis of the ‘act of aesthetic apprehension’ which underpins the theoretical chapters of Stephen Hero and of A Portrait. In Paris he also met John Millington Synge, who lent him a typescript of Riders to the Sea, which he criticized as insufficiently Aristotelian. Back in Dublin after his mother’s death, he embarked on a period of dissipation with Gogarty, but continued the literary notices for the Daily Express which he had begun to write in 1902 (having repaid Lady Gregory’s introduction to the editor with a harsh review of Poets and Dreamers, which he sent from Paris, March 1903). He lived at various Dublin addresses, and briefly stayed with Gogarty at the Martello Tower in Sandycove, 9-15 September 1904, quitting in a spirit of mutual distrust which was never entirely overcome, and which led to the unflattering portrayal of Gogarty as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.

1904 was the year in which Joyce turned from preliminary definitions to literary activity. In one day (7 January), he wrote an essay, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and when it was refused by the editors of Dana he immediately began to expand its enthusiastic account of the spiritual growth of the literary protagonist into the autobiographical novel which was to occupy him on and off until the writing was abandoned in 1913. Three stories of what was to be the Dubliners (1914) collection were invited by Russell and appeared in The Irish Homestead (August-December 1904), but the connection was discontinued when they began to elicit hostile reactions from its largely rural readership. ‘The Holy Office’ (August 1904; printed Trieste, June 1905), a rhyming satire on the Literary Revival, announced his intention of using psychological realism as an antidote to the idealistic folk-art of the leading writers: ‘I carry off their filthy streams/That they may dream their dreamy dreams’. He called himself ‘the sewer of their clique’ and took the pseudo-Aristotelian name ‘Katharsis-Purgative’.

On 10 June he met Nora Barnacle, a girl of scant education from Galway who was working as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel on Nassau St., Dublin. His love for Nora opened a source of ordinary human feeling upon which he drew strenuously at all stages of his career, basing Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on her unembarrassed sexuality. Joyce and Nora first walked out on 16 June 1904 and probably engaged in physical intimacies, making the date so sacrosanct that he chose it as the day of Ulysses (sometimes called Bloomsday). Then and later, he wrote her letters of adulation, identifying her soul with that of Ireland and confessing the unlimited extent of his literary ambitions as well as his antipathy to Irish society. He also wrote some erotic letters expressing a desire for masochistic submission and some fetishistic appetites - notably during a visit made to Dublin in 1909. The fit of jealousy he experienced at that time, when Cosgrave alleged having shared her favours during the summer of his courtship, fuelled his ready sense of betrayal, which became a major theme of Exiles. Joyce and Nora lived together until his death, marrying at a registry office in London, 1931, to legitimize their children. On 8 October 1904 Joyce left Dublin with Nora for a teaching post in Paris which was not available on arrival. He was redirected first to Pola and then to Trieste, where he remained for ten years. From there, he sent twelve stories of Dubliners to the London publisher Grant Richards. The saga of the publication of Dubliners began in October 1906 when Richards accepted the book, but it was not to appear until 1914, after numerous checks imposed by censorious printers and equally frequent rejections by other nervous publishers. Joyce wrote the last story, ‘The Dead’, while convalescing from an attack of rheumatic fever in 1907.

The perilously-financed household in Trieste was augmented by the birth of Giorgio in 1905 and Lucia in 1907. With Joyce’s encouragement, Stanislaus joined them from Ireland in 1905 and became an economic mainstay. Nevertheless Joyce’s low income from teaching, together with his drinking habits, enforced frequent migrations from flat to flat. A brief attempt to improve the situation by working as a clerk in the foreign department of a Roman bank (autumn 1906-winter 1907) was not successful. On returning to Trieste in early 1907 he left the Berlitz School taking with him some private pupils, who provided better rates of payment and more flexible working-hours. His social world was expanding, largely through the influence of a favorite pupil Ettore Schmitz - the novelist Italo Svevo, whose idiosyncratic books he brought to wider notice. In 1909, he undertook to open a Dublin cinema, the Volta (the first in Ireland), for a Triestino company. Due to his choosing Italian rather than American films, the audience rapidly fell off. At the same time he successfully persuaded George Roberts of Maunsel and Co., to publish Dubliners, but again censorship difficulties at the printers intervened although a run of a thousand copies was actually produced - the so-called 1910 Dubliners Edition, later to be destroyed in September 1912. In 1911, a flirtation with Amalia Popper led to a renewal of epiphanic writing, resulting in eight large sheets (edited by Richard Ellmann as Giacomo Joyce, 1968), parts of which were later transposed to Ulysses. Nora visited Galway in the summer of that year, and Joyce followed her to Ireland when she failed to write to him. His efforts to make Roberts issue Dubliners resulted in the destruction of the edition by the printer, and Joyce retaliated ‘Gas from a Burner’, a rhyming satire impersonating Roberts, with much sarcasm about his role as publisher to the literary revival. By a ‘ruse’, as Joyce put it in a letter, he managed to secure a set of proofs from the aborted edition, however, and these were used to set the 1914 edition in the absence of the manuscript. In 1913 Yeats alerted Ezra Pound to Joyce’s talent, and the latter included the poem ‘I hear an army charging upon the land’ in his Imagist anthology ( Des Imagiste, 1914). When Joyce sent him the first chapter of his autobiographical novel in its revised form Pound found a publisher for it: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first appeared serially in The Egoist (2 February 1914-1 September 1915) and then in book-form for Benjamin W. Huebsch in New York (1916), an Egoist Press edition following in London (1917). Meanwhile, Joyce had reopened negotiations with Grant Richards, and Dubliners was published in London on 15th June, 1914, an American edition being issued by Huebsch in the same month as A Portrait.

Joyce now began to receive financial support through Pound’s advocacy, notably from Miss Harriet Shaw Weaver (co-editor of The Egoist with Dora Marsden), and less dependably from Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, who wanted him to submit to psychoanalysis. Yeats secured allowances for him from the Royal Literary Fund and the Civil List. Improved finances and Pound’s critical support gave Joyce the confidence to commence a novel which he had earlier contemplated as a final story for Dubliners. He began writing Ulysses with the ‘Calypso’ episode on 1 March 1914, and had completed the first three chapters (‘Telemachiad’) by early 1917. Serial publication proceeded in The Little Review (March 1918-December 1920) under the editorship of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap until halted by prosecution for obscenity in America in 1921.

The First World War compelled Joyce to move to Zürich, arriving 30 June 1915. There he continued with Ulysses, establishing a friendship with the English painter Frank Budgen, who later issued a key study, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934). Joyce returned at the cessation of hostilities to Trieste (mid-October 1919) before moving to Paris (8 July 1920) on Pound’s advice. There he soon met Sylvia Beach, who offered to bring out Ulysses under her Shakespeare & Company bookshop imprint, with the help of Adrienne Monnier whose Maison des Amis des Livres was opposite her premises on rue de l’Odéon. In December 1921 the well-known French writer Valery Larbaud attracted advance subscriptions with a lecture given at Monnier’s shop in the course of which he announced that Ireland had re-entered the mainstream of European literature. The book appeared in the Marseillais printer Darentiere’s light blue and white cover in time for Joyce’s fortieth birthday, 2 February 1922.

Consignments of the Egoist Press edition were confiscated and destroyed at American and British customs during 1923. A successful attempt to prevent magazine piracy by Samuel Roth in America in 1928 was followed by the celebrated appeal against the obscenity charge conducted in Judge Woolsley’s court by Morris L. Ernst for Bernard Cerf in 1933, making possible the 1934 Random House edition - though not before the German Odyssey Press editions (1922), a German translation by George Goyert (1927), a French one by Larbaud with August Morel and Stuart Gilbert (1929), a Czech one (1930), and two unauthorized Japanese translations (1932) had all appeared in response to the book’s growing reputation. The Egoist Press then used Random House sheets - themselves set from Roth’s pirated edition of 1929 - to issue Ulysses in Britain in 1934. The first Bodley Head edition, based on the Odyssey Press’s second printing, appeared in 1936. This was reset in 1960, while the more modern editions from Random House (1961) and Penguin (1968) followed the Bodley Head text.

A uniquely complex history of transmission was further complicated by the fact that Joyce made extensive additions to the third copy of the typescripts of chapters sent out to The Egoist and The Little Review, in preparing the Shakespeare and Co. edition for publication. Besides such large differences, estimates of errors arising from discrepancies between the typescripts and the corresponding printings have been put in the area of four thousand. In an effort to establish a corrected standard version, a controversial ‘genetic’ text was prepared by Hans Walter Gabler for the James Joyce Estate (Bodley Head, 1984; Penguin 1986). Several unrevised editions from various publishing houses were issued when Ulysses emerged from copyright protection in 1991, while a conservatively corrected version has been undertaken by John Kidd (1994).

With the production of his play Exiles in 1919, Joyce fulfilled an early ambition to write for the theatre. In 1900, he had composed A Brilliant Career (a play dedicated ‘To My Own Soul’) and a verse-play called Dream Stuff, both now lost; while, in the following summer, he translated two works of Gerhart Hauptmann. Exiles, a study of jealousy, was begun in 1913, when he was urging Nora towards infidelities (which she resisted) in a spirit of emotional enquiry. It had one contemporary performance only, in Berlin (7 August 1919), but has been revived with more success since Harold Pinter’s 1970 production in London in recent times. Joyce’s slight interest in its advancement probably indicates that it had done its work for him as a laboratory for the theme of ‘restless, wounding doubt’ which he was simultaneously elaborating in Ulysses.

During the autumn of 1922 he began to compile notes for a new book, incorporating unused material from Ulysses. The resulting arrangement took shape as Buffalo Notebook VI.A (published by Thomas Staley as Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake, 1961) which stores key-phrases in forty-seven sections named after previous works by Joyce, including each of the Dubliners stories and the chapter-titles of Ulysses. During that year, he studied Sir Edward Sullivan’s 1920 Studio edition of the Book of Kells, drawing his friends’ attention to the Irishness of its densely patterned illuminations. On 10 March 1923, he wrote a draft of the first episode, ‘King Roderick O’Conor’ (now pp.380-82 of Finnegans Wake, in all eds.). The ensuing labour of ‘Work in Progress’ - as the book was known before publication - took seventeen years, during which Joyce experienced physical, mental, and emotional trials arising from operations for failing eyesight, and recurrent gastro-intestinal attacks; the uncertainty of Giorgio’s future; the increasingly evident schizophrenia of his daughter Lucia; and the growing hostility of former supporters, notably his brother Stanislaus and Ezra Pound.

Sections of Finnegans Wake were published in avant garde magazines including transatlantic review (April 1924), Criterion (July 1925), Navire d’argent (October 1925), and transition (April 1927-April/May 1938). Episodes and combinations of episodes were published as Anna Livia Plurabelle (New York, October 1928; London, June 1930); Tales Told by Shem and Shaun (Paris, August 1929), and Two Tales of Shem and Shaun (London, December 1932); and Haveth Childers Everywhere (Paris and New York, June 1930; London, June 1931). As with Ulysses, Joyce continued to make extensive additions to Wake episodes in successive typescripts and galleyproofs. This necessitated the use of different coloured crayons and a large oblong magnifying glass to read his notes. He relied heavily on friends to read books at his request, making lists of words and allusions for inclusion in the Wake. He even accepted accidental errors in dictation or transcription when they suited his sense of the wider purpose of a passage, believing that the book was in a sense a corporate creation.

The result of such methods, together with the practical difficulties for its readers arising from the multi-layered and multi-lingual techniques, soon attracted suspicions of a hoax, and the small but enthusiastic following won by Ulysses began to fall away. In order to galvanize interest, Joyce marshalled twelve essays by supporters including Samuel Beckett, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Thomas MacGreevy, and William Carlos Williams, and ending with two letters of protest, the second a jocose ‘litter’ in Wakese by one Vladimir Dixon (Joyce himself). All of these were issued by Sylvia Beach as Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929). Finnegans Wake was completed on 13 November 1938 and published on Joyce’s forty-seventh birthday, on 2 February 1939.

The outbreak of the Second World War caused the Joyces to move to Gérand-le-Puy, the town near Vichy where Maria Jolas (editor of transition with her husband Eugene) kept a bilingual school attended by Joyce’s grandson Stephen (b. 1932). On 14 December 1940, the family entered Switzerland with special visas - all except Lucia who was by then in a sanatorium. On 10 January 1941, Joyce was seized by stomach pains and carried in great pain to the Schwesterhaus vom Roten Kreuz hospital, where he died after an apparently successful operation for an ulcerated duodenum on the night of 13 January. He was buried at a small funeral in the Fluntern Cemetery, without religious ceremony.

The standard bibliography of Joyce’s works is by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (1971). For Joyce’s minor works, see Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, eds., The Critical Writings (1959; rep. 1989), and Ellmann et al., eds., James Joyce: Poems and Shorter Writings (1990). His Dublin and Paris notebooks were edited by Robert Scholes and Richard Kain as The Workshop of Daedalus (1965). The totality of notebooks, manuscripts, typescripts and corrected galleys have been issued in photocopy in Michael Groden et al., eds., The James Joyce Archive, 63 vols (1977-79). Joyce’s letters were edited by Stuart Gilbert (Vol. I, 1957, and by Ellmann (Vols. II & III, 1966), followed by Selected Letters (1975). For biography see Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (1939); Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World (1957); Chester Anderson, James Joyce & His World (1967); Helene Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce (1976); Brenda Maddox, A Biography of Nora Joyce (1988); and Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; rev. 1982), the standard work, and Maurice Beja, James Joyce: a Literary Life (1992).

Memoirs include Italo Svevo, James Joyce (1950); J. F. Byrne, The Silent Years: An Autobiography with Memoirs of James Joyce (1953); Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (1966), and The Complete Dublin Diary (1971); C. P. Curran, James Joyce Remembered (1968); Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (1974); and Willard Potts, ed., Portraits of the Artist in Exile (1979). Handbooks to Joyce include William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (1959); Zack Bowen and James F. Carens, eds., A Companion to Joyce Studies (1984) and Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (1990). Contemporary and early notices of Joyce were collected by Robert Deming in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols (1970).

For criticism, see Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (1932); Harry Levin, James Joyce (1941); L. A. G. Strong, The Sacred River (1949); Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (1955); S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (1961); C. H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist (1977); Dominic Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, (1980); Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrier, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce (1984); Suzette Henke, Joyce and Feminism (1984); Bernard Benstock, James Joyce (1985); Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, (1985); Bonnie Kime Scott, James Joyce (1987), and Vicki Mahaffey, Reauthorising Joyce (1988). Academic organs devoted to Joyce include James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies, and a James Joyce Broadsheet, while the Joyce Foundation, Zurich, organizes international symposia and publishes a Newsletter and organises the James Joyce International Symposium in different cities every year.

Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce dealing with the moribund lives of a cast of mostly lower-middle class characters through pointedly undramatic events chosen to illustrate the crippling effects of family, religion, and nationality — themes treated more discursively in Stephen Hero, the autobiographical novel being written at the same time. The collection began in response to an invitation from George Russell to write for The Irish Homestead, but only three stories (‘The Sisters’, ‘Eveline’, and ‘After the Race’) had appeared over the signature Stephen Daedalus when publication was discontinued. By then, if not earlier, Joyce had conceived the idea of a thematically integrated volume and he continued writing stories in the same ‘vivisective’ spirit after leaving Ireland in October 1904. In December 1905 he sent twelve stories to the English publisher Grant Richards, having added ‘Araby’, ‘An Encounter’, ‘The Boarding House’, ‘Counterparts’, ‘Clay’, ‘A Painful Case’, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, ‘A Mother’, and ‘Grace’. During the next year he finished two others (‘Two Gallants’, ‘A Little Cloud’), while ‘The Dead’ — much the longest — was written in 1907. By then however, progress had been arrested by the reactions of a nervous printer who detected a risk of prosecution in an allusion to Edward VII’s private life in ‘Ivy Day’, and in 1906 Richards repudiated his contract. In 1909 Joyce signed another with George Roberts of Maunsel & Co., but similar difficulties ended in the wholesale destruction of the 1910 edition. The collection was rejected by other English publishers 1912 and 1913, but in November 1913 Richards approached Joyce again and Dubliners finally appeared on 15 June, 1914.

n letters to Richards during 1906, Joyce described the governing idea of the collection: ‘My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis’. He further claimed to have treated his theme under the successive aspects of childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The childhood stories use an unnamed first-person narrator writing in retrospect, perhaps from early adulthood, with a largely tacit understanding of his former experiences. The rest are written in the third person with varying proportions of irony and sarcasm. The theme of paralysis is launched in the first story with an account of a priest’s death caused by an unnamed disease with symptoms suggestive of tertiary syphilis. The ensuing stories illustrate various kinds of social, emotional, and intellectual dysfunction arising from alcoholism, familial violence, and social conformity, with Irish Catholicism generally in the background as the underlying cause.

The distinctive method of the stories consists in building the narrative up out of give-away phrases excerpted directly from the characters’ typical usage, thus revealing the moral limitations of their shared mentality with a minimum of authorial intrusion. This appears to be what Joyce meant by a ‘a style of scrupulous meanness’ in one of his letters to Grant Richards. Instances of the Dubliners’ adherence to cliché-ridden habits of thought and conduct are carefully presented as evidence of their alleged inability to take charge of their own lives which he elsewhere called the ‘general paralysis of an insane society’. An innovative typographical feature is the use of dashes instead of the ‘perverted commas’ (as he called them), though these were unfortunately printed in the early editions. This technique, which can be traced to the epiphanies, breaks down the conventional distinction between dialogue and narration. The reception of Dubliners in contemporary Ireland was marked by distaste for the subject-matter and the angle of approach, with James Stephens professing Joyce to be a better poet than a story-writer. Each title in the collection is parodied in Finnegans Wake (pp.186-7), and each serves to name a section of the notebook (Buffalo Notebook VI.A, published as Scribbledehobble, 1961) in which Joyce made the preparations for that work. See Robert Scholes, ed., Dubliners: The Corrected Text (1967); Clive Hart, ed., James Joyce’s Dubliners: Critical Essays (1969); Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1982), and Donald T. Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners (1986).

‘The Sisters, the initial story in Dubliners (1914), it establishes the theme of spiritual paralysis with an anti-clerical example. Rev. James Flynn, a disgraced diocesan priest, is dying in the house of his sisters who live over a run-down draper’s shop in Great Britain (now Parnell) St. The conversations which reveal the formalistic Catholicism of the priest and the ignorance or self-deception of his sisters are remembered later in life by the boy who visited him for religious instruction. His young mind provides a partly unconscious mirror for the hypocrisy of his elders, and though he fears the repulsive symptoms he is also morbidly attracted towards the ‘pleasant and vicious region’ where the disease is ‘performing its deadly work’. The death of the priest brings him a sense of liberation. A first version of the story appeared in The Irish Homestead, August 1904.

‘An Encounter’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. Three school-boys plan ‘a day’s miching’ (truancy), inspired by comic-book adventures, but only the narrator and Mahoney appear at the rendezvous. When they reach a deserted field in Ringsend they are approached by a man with a good accent who interrogates them about their girlfriends. The man retires to the end of the field and masturbates. Returning, he then begins to talk about chastizing boys. The narrator calls out to his friend Mahoney, whom he somewhat despises, and finds himself almost as much humiliated in turning to him for rescue as he is frightened by the obsessive undercurrents of the man’s monologue. Such an episode, involving Joyce and his brother Stanislaus [Joyce], took place in 1895.

‘Araby’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. It deals with the conflict between romantic ideas and the reality of experience, and is based on an incident in Joyce’s early adolescence. A boy living with his aunt and uncle falls in love with the unattainable older sister of his friend Mangan. When the travelling bazaar called Araby sets up in Dublin he promises to bring her something from it as she cannot go herself. On the evening of the bazaar his uncle has been drinking and delays him; on arrival he finds the stalls being dismantled and is unsettled by the common English accents of the stall-keepers. Lingering in the darkened hall, he feels his humiliation well up as tears.

‘Eveline’, a story in Dubliners (1914). A girl keeping house for her father meets a sailor who asks her to leave Ireland with him. She agrees to go, but her courage fails her at the moment of departure. Apart from the final quayside scene the story consists in Eveline’s thoughts as she weighs her father’s domestic violence against the life she might enjoy as Frank’s wife in South America. These considerations are balanced with recollections of the few occasions when her father was kind to her, promises to her mother, and fears of the sailor’s unknown character. A verdict on her stricken inability to board the boat is complicated by the fact that his tale of having ‘landed on his feet’ in Buenes Aires does not inspire much confidence. An early version of the story appeared in The Irish Homestead, September 1904.

‘After the Race’, a story in Dubliners (1914). Jimmy Doyle, the son of a successful butcher, attends a motor-race in the company of other young men more cosmpolitan than he. Though lacking in self-confidence, he struggles to keep up with the company in hilarity and recklessness, and loses heavily at cards on a yacht in Kingstown Harbour. At the close of the story, he shelters in a ‘dark stupor’ which covers up the folly of an adventure far beyond his social and financial resources. Joyce interviewed a French competitor in the Gordon Bennett Cup for The Irish Times in Paris, April 1903, and his mildly disdainful article contained the title-phrase. The story, his sole attempt to portray the affluent bourgeoisie, points to an incongruity between the expensive cars and the poverty-striken areas through which they race around Dublin. An early version appeared in The Irish Homestead, December 1904.

‘Two Gallants’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1906. Two young men living by their wits connive in cadging money from a servant-girl, working in Merrion Square. Walking with Lenihan towards an assignation, Corley expounds his views on the superiority of ‘slaveys’ to girls of other classes in relation to his physical and financial needs. While awaiting his return, Lenehan eats in a poor refreshment bar, reflecting anxiously on his lack of funds and dreaming of finding a ‘simple-minded girl with a little of the ready’. Later in the evening Corley shows him the half-sovereign the girl has presumably stolen for him. Lenehan’s demoralisation is treated with a mixture of sympathy and contempt. The ironic title evokes the reputed chivalry of eighteenth-century Dublin.

‘The Boarding House’, a story in Dubliners (1915), written in 1905. Bob Doran, clerk in a vintner’s business that supplies the clergy, is trapped into marriage to Polly Mooney, the daughter of a domineering lodging-house keeper. Polly’s tacit awareness of the intention behind her mother’s persistent silence about her visits to his bedroom indicates a complicity based in the recognition that the time has come for her to marry. While her mother interviews Doran downstairs, Polly dreamily awaits the outcome sitting on his bed. Doran is mortified by his entanglement with a girl who is beginning to get a certain reputation, but threats from her foul-mouthed brother, fear of his employers, and the remonstrations of the priest in the confessional all enforce submission. He reappears in Ulysses on one of his alcoholic ‘benders’.

‘A Little Cloud’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1906. Little Chandler is going to meet his former friend Ignatius Gallaher, now a successful London journalist. He fantasizes about the poetry he could write and regrets that his name is not more Irish-looking in anticipation of reviews remarking on his ‘Celtic note’. In a fashionable eating house, Gallaher regales him with stories of sexual licence in European cities and Chandler confesses meekly to his marriage. Gallaher is disdainful and, in spite of recognizing the tawdriness of his friend’s attainments, Chandler blames his own timidity for the difference in their lives. Returning home, he feels a dull resentment and loses his temper when the baby starts to cry. When his wife returns her angry rebuke reduces him to tears of shame and remorse. In common with ‘A Mother’ the story examines the intersection between the codes of petty-bourgeois Irish society and the romanticism of the literary revival.

‘Counterparts’, a short story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. Farrington, an inefficient copy-clerk in a law-office, is bullied by his immediate superior, Mr. Alleyne. He fortuitously manages a witty reply in the presence of a lady whom Alleyne looks up to. Pawning his watch, he embarks on a pub-crawl in the course of which he enjoys newly-won celebrity for his wit, but later is humiliated at armwrestling with a smaller man. An attempted flirtation with an artiste also comes to nothing, and the prospect of being sacked begins to loom in front of him. Returning home drunk to find his wife is out at the chapel and no dinner waiting, he takes out his resentment on a son, who promises to say a Hail Mary for him to avoid a beating. The title underlines the workings of a vicious circle.

‘Clay’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. It centres on a marginalized woman in a society dominated by family and religion. Maria now works in the Dublin by Lamplight Laundry, but years before looked after Joe Donnelly and his brother Alphy, who are now at odds with one another. Maria gets permission to visit the Donnellys for a Hallow Eve party [see Samhain]. She buys a plumcake for the children with her small wages but loses it on the bus, and the good word she later puts in for Alphy is violently rebuffed by Joe. Mrs Donnelly remains frosty towards her, and during the party game when she is blindfolded the children trick her into choosing wet clay, a symbol of death.

‘A Painful Case’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. Mr. Duffy, a celibate of intellectual and ascetic disposition, meets Mrs. Sinico at a concert. For a time he is flattered by her interest in him, but recoils when her passion becomes evident. Four years later he reads with shock of her death by suicide. At first he congratulates himself on having broken with an unstable woman, but later, when watching lovers in the Phoenix Park, he feels cut off from life and comes to realize that he has wronged her and hurt himself. Duffy’s view of love as a bond of sorrow derives from Stanislaus Joyce’s collection of aphorisms which his brother called ‘Bile Beans’, while his translating Gerhart Hauptmann reflects Joyce’s own work on Michael Kramer in 1901.

‘A Mother’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. Mrs. Kearney married a bootmaker after her chilly musical accomplishments, acquired at a high-class convent, had scared off younger suitors. Through the singing talents of her grown daughter, fortunately named Kathleen, she has been able to re-launch her social aspirations in the atmosphere of the Irish literary revival. When Kathleen is put in for the musical concert of the Eire Abu Society the programme miscarries, and the number of performances required of her is reduced. Mrs Kearney tries to secure full payment, and succeeds in getting half the sum before she makes the mistake of mimicking the vulgar accent of an organizer. After that her conduct is condemned on all sides, and the organizer dismisses her off-handedly. Written in a freer style than the other stories, ‘A Mother’ reflects Joyce’s own experience at the Antient Concert Rooms in 1903 when a Miss Eileen Reidy was withdrawn by her mother on Joyce’s being heard to ask for a whiskey.

‘Grace’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. Mr. Kernan, a commercial traveller, falls drunkenly down the steps of the lavatory in a pub. At home in bed he is visited by friends who involve him in a plan to change his ways at a religious retreat. The three-part structure, following events from pub to sickroom, and then to church, corresponds ironically to the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso of Dante’s Divina Commedia . The dialogue is studded with received ideas about the Roman Catholic and other religions, and the characters consistently use the word ‘grace’ to connote respectability only. Fr. Purdon, who runs a mission to professional men, interprets the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16.8-9) in terms of the principles of book-keeping. The original of the portrait was Fr. Bernard Vaughan, whose sermon on grace so disgusted Joyce that he is here named after a prominent street in the Dublin brothel quarter.

‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, a story in Dubliners (1914), written in 1905. A group of hired canvassers are gathered in the office of a nationalist candidate in the municipal elections on the anniversary of Parnell’s death. Their vacuous brief is to convince the rate-payers who make up the electorate that Mr Richard J. Kearney is a respectable man who will benefit the country. Mr. Crofton considers himself superior to his companions as having previously canvassed for better men, albeit of the opposite party. Mr. O’Connor, Mr. Henchy, and Mr. Hynes conduct most of the back-biting conversation which makes up the substance of the story. Warmed by drink, Joe Hynes recites a poem on ‘Our Uncrowned King’. A reference to the private life of Edward VII caused difficulties with the printer that precipitated the rejection of Dubliners by the publisher Grant Richards.