Dubliners - Joyce, James

. .

Résumé :
Dubliners is James Joyce's landmark collection of fifteen stories, a precise and unsparing portrait of life in early twentieth-century Dublin. Moving from childhood to adolescence, adulthood, public life, and finally to the great closing story The Dead, Joyce presents a city held in place by habit, religion, family pressure, political frustration, social ambition, failed escape, and moments of painful self-recognition. Project Gutenberg identifies Dubliners as fifteen stories written from 1904 to 1907 and published in 1914, set in early twentieth-century Dublin and centred on Irish middle-class life, paralysis, disillusionment, nationalism, Catholicism, and British rule. This is one of the essential short story collections in English, not because it announces itself loudly, but because of Joyce's control: small encounters, ordinary rooms, half-spoken desires, and missed chances become revelations of an entire society. Stories such as Araby, Eveline, A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, and The Dead show Joyce developing the method that would lead toward literary modernism while still writing in a lucid, realist style. For readers of Irish literature, classic short stories, modernist fiction, Dublin fiction, and twentieth-century literary classics, Dubliners remains a necessary starting point: compact, severe, beautifully made, and quietly devastating....

Biographie:
James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, and one of the central figures of literary modernism. Born in Dublin, Joyce spent much of his adult life outside Ireland, but Dublin remained the imaginative centre of his work. His fiction transformed the possibilities of modern prose through its attention to consciousness, language, memory, ordinary urban life, religious inheritance, national identity, and the pressure of private desire within public and social forms.Joyce's major works include Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Dubliners, his first prose fiction book, remains the most accessible entry into his world and one of the great achievements of the modern short story. Its realism is exact, but its effects are larger than documentary detail: Joyce turns daily life into a sequence of moral and emotional revelations, exposing the paralysis, longing, frustration, humour, and buried tenderness of a city and its people. For readers of Irish literature, modernism, classic short fiction, and twentieth-century literary history, Joyce is unavoidable....