DUBLINERS, JOYCE, JAMES

"When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years," James Joyce once wrote to his brother, "that it is the 'second city' of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world." Dubliners, completed when James Joyce was only twenty-five, is the first of his works to demonstrate the unique, innovative style that would make him one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century. Joyce turns his discerning eye to Dublin's lower middle class—to the petit-bourgeois world of shopkeepers, tradesmen, functionaries, and clerks. The result is a portrait of Dublin life in the early 1900s, an undisputed masterpiece of human experience played out against a defeated city.