By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
James Joyce’s collection Dubliners (1914) was not an initial commercial success. It sold just 379 copies in its first year of publication, and 120 of those were bought by Joyce himself. Yet Dubliners redefined the short story and is now viewed as a classic work of modernist fiction, with each of its fifteen short stories repaying close analysis. Here are five of Joyce’s very best stories from Dubliners.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Eveline’ is one of the shortest stories that make up James Joyce’s collection Dubliners (1914), a volume that was not an initial commercial success (it sold just 379 copies in its first year of publication, and 120 of those were bought by Joyce himself). We have analysed the collection as a whole, and summarised each of the stories in Dubliners, here.
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the ancient Roman novel that inspired James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald
Today is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s vast modernist masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), is set in Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904. Since at least the 1950s, devotees of Joyce’s novel have marked the 16th of June each year by reading the book, getting drunk on Guinness, or – in the case of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – getting married on that day. I’d like to mark Bloomsday by paying homage to ancient Rome’s equivalent to Joyce’s 1920s novel, and an underappreciated work of classical literature that almost certainly influenced him.
Three of the most important works of western literature from the 1920s, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, all tip a wink to a remarkable work of literature from classical Rome that has survived only as fragments. Depending on your view, it’s either one of the first novels ever written, or a scandalous piece of trashy pornography. Its title – Satyricon, meaning ‘satyr-like adventures’ – provides a clue to the bawdiness on offer.
1. James Joyce was born in the same year as another notable modernist writer, Virginia Woolf. But the similarities don’t end there. Both were born in 1882, but both writers also died in the same year, 1941. Both wrote landmark modernist novels, published in the 1920s, whose principal action takes place over just one day in mid-June … Read more
By Viola van de Sandt Edith Wharton’s most famous novels – among them The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920) – have earned her a steadfast place within the modern-day canon of American literature. Yet some of the most interesting and provocative instances of her writing are also … Read more