paralysis which many consider a city.' Joyce believed passionately that Irish society and culture had been frozen in place for centuries by two forces: the Roman Catholic Church and England.

James Joyce himself wrote, 'I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that. All appear in the collection's very first story, 'The Sisters' - and all continue to appear throughout the book, up to and including the magnificent final tale, 'The Dead.' For Joyce's three major themes in Dubliners are paralysis, corruption, and death. Of course, the forest is no fairyland, either. It can be difficult to see the forest in this book for the blighted, stunted, gnarled trees. This distraction can prevent them from appreciating Dubliners' deeper, more universal themes. To this day, despite a more liberal attitude in art and entertainment regarding the issues dramatized in the book (premarital sex, for instance, is hardly the taboo it was when 'The Boarding House' appeared), many first-time readers are distracted by the unsavory surface details of nearly all the stories. In contrast to his status-conscious character Gabriel Conroy, James Joyce rejected good taste - one of the characteristics that mark his art as Modern.Ī precedent existed for Joyce's warts-and-all approach, in the nineteenth-century French school of writing known as Naturalism, but no writer had ever been quite as explicit, or as relentlessly downbeat, as Joyce in Dubliners. Disrespectful dialogue about the king of England, and even the use of the mild British oath 'bloody,' were thought by many to go beyond the bounds of good taste - and they did.

(In the past, fiction writers had almost invariably changed the names of their short-story and novel settings, or discretely left them out altogether.) In fact, including these details delayed publication of the book by years, as potential publishers and printers feared lawsuits by those businesses mentioned by name.

The use throughout of the names of Dublin streets and parks - and especially shops, pubs, and railway companies - was seen as scandalous, too. The collection all but overflows with unattractive human behavior: simony, truancy, pederasty, drunkenness (all of them in the first three stories alone!), child and spousal abuse, gambling, prostitution, petty thievery, blackmail, and suicide. Even before its London publication in 1914, James Joyce's Dubliners caused considerable controversy due to the material in the stories that was obvious and accessible, available to even the most casual readers and reviewers.

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