James Joyce Short Fiction Analysis
James Joyce Long Fiction Analysis
James Joyce Poetry: British Analysis
James Joyce World Literature Analysis
Joyce, James (Poetry Criticism)
Joyce, James (Short Story Criticism)
Joyce, James (Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism)
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(Short Story Criticism)
James Joyce 1882–-1941
(Full name James Augustine Aloysius Joyce) Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, and critic.
The following entry presents criticism on Joyce's short fiction from 1992 to 2002. For criticism prior to 1992, see SSC, Volume 3; for discussion of the short story "The Dead," see SSC, Volume 26; and for discussion of the short story "Araby," see SSC, Volume 44.
Joyce is considered one of the most influential literary figures of the first half of the twentieth century. Through experimental, symbolic prose, he redefined the limits of language and reinvented the form of the modern novel. Joyce's only short story collection, Dubliners (1914), is considered a master achievement in the genre.
Joyce was born into a middle-class home in a suburb of Dublin. His family moved frequently to a variety of neighborhoods throughout the city of Dublin; their periodic relocation reflected a progressive financial decline that took them from comfort to virtual poverty. The economic hardships that necessitated the family's many moves served to bring Joyce into close contact with many aspects of city life that would later appear in his fiction. During his childhood, Joyce attended Jesuit schools as a scholarship entrant and was considered a talented student. His church-based education did not lead to the priesthood, as his parents had hoped, and he eventually rejected Catholicism, in part for its role in creating the parochial, narrow-minded society from which he later sought escape.
Following his graduation from University College in Dublin in 1902, Joyce left Ireland to live in Paris, deliberately abandoning the life he knew and would later depict in harsh detail in Dubliners. He returned to Ireland the next year when his mother became seriously ill, and when she died in 1904, Joyce moved permanently to the European continent with Nora Barnacle, a chamber maid from Galway whom he did not marry until 1931. Living in Trieste, Italy, the couple had two children, and Joyce made a living as a language instructor while struggling to find publishers for his short fiction, the full collection of which was deemed too controversial to print. Dubliners appeared first as a handful of stories published in an Irish periodical and was eventually published as a volume of fifteen stories in 1914. This was followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in New York in 1916 and in London the following year. By 1922, with the publication of the novel Ulysses, Joyce had secured for himself an international reputation as a leading modernist. During the writing of the novel, however, Joyce endured the first of eleven surgeries to address progressive vision problems due to glaucoma. His final novel, Finnegans Wake, appeared in 1939 to negative critical response. At the outbreak of World War II, Joyce was living in Paris, where he stayed as long as he could. He eventually settled in Switzerland, where he died of a stomach ulcer in January 1941.
Major Works of Short Fiction
Despite his self-imposed exile from the country of his birth, Joyce nonetheless made Ireland and its people the subject of his writing. His first published volume of fiction was Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories all set in Dublin and dramatizing ordinary urban lives of the day. Three of the stories, "The Sisters," "Eveline," and "After the Race," first appeared in the journal Irish Homestead at the end of 1904. Joyce revised and expanded these three and added eleven further stories for a volume that was planned for publication in 1906 by English publisher Grant Richards. Richards's printer refused to produce the work, however, alleging that the stories were indecent. Joyce, preferring that the works remain unpublished rather than amended to suit the tastes of others, explained in a May 5, 1906, letter to Richards that his intention in writing Dubliners "was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose...
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James Joyce Homework Help Questions
What makes James Joyce important?
James Joyce wrote the novel Ulysses in 1922. This novel is viewed by many as the most influential novel of the 20th century. This novel included various styles of writing and contained a...
How has James Joyce contributed to modern literature?
James Joyce is regarded as the most inventive writer of modernist literature. He not only used the stream-of-consciousness method that was popular among his contemporaries in Ulysses, his...
What are the styles of these four writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, and...
[eNotes provides for only the briefest answer to such a broad question.] James Joyce is a Modernist. His style includes experimentation with structure, dialogue and characterization. For instance,...
In The Dead by James Joyce, is there anything ironic about the substance of Gabriel's speech? If...
Two ironies exist in Gabriel's speech in "The Dead," by James Joyce. First, Gabriel praises the tradition of Irish hospitality. The lavish table his aunts have set is worthy of praise, but...
How does James Joyce criticize Father Flynn in his story "The Sisters"?
Joyce's depiction of Father Flynn in "The Sisters" is marked by hints, innuendoes, and vague suggestions. As such, we never get a full picture of who this man really was or what made him tick. The...
A Little Cloud
by James Joyce
A Painful Case
Araby
by James Baldwin
Every Man in His Humour
by Ben Jonson
by Bertolt Brecht
The Way to Rainy Mountain
by N. Scott Momaday
by Cynthia Lord
Beach Burial
by Kenneth Slessor
Winter Dawn
The Boy Behind the Curtain
by Tim Winton
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