Dubliners - Joyce, James

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Résumé :
Dubliners is an enthralling collection of modernist short stories which form a turalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. Joyce's first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. These stories, including such unforgettable ones as Araby, Grace, and The Dead, delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. The initial stories in the collection are rrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and maturity.

Biographie:
James Joyce (1882 - 1941) was born in Dublin, Ireland, to a well-meaning but financially inept father and a solemn, pious mother. One of the most revered writers of the 20th century, he was noted for his experimental use of language in his works. His first publication, an essay on Ibsen's play, appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. In 1904, he made his first attempt at a novel, Stephen Hero and also attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected. At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved to Zurich, where he wrote Exiles, reworked on the early chapters of Ulysses and published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in a serial form. It appeared in twenty-five instalments in The Egoist. Almost a complete rewrite of the abandoned Stephen Hero, it is heavily autobiographical incorporating the techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue.