Dubliners was published in 1914 and written by James Joyce, who was born in 1882. When applying feminist theory to the Dubliners short stories, one must keep in mind that although feminism had its start in the 19th century, many of the formative...

Throughout history, every generation sees its fair share of change and innovation, but when James Joyce first made his literary debut with Dubliners, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, change was occurring with a rapidity never before...

Religion has been at the heart of Irish identity for centuries, with Christianity being introduced around the 4th century CE. This has also been the focus for much of the political tension between Ireland and England in the more recent centuries....

In James Joyce’s collection of short stories Dubliners the stories are put in chronological order so it seems that the characters are slowly becoming older and older both physically and mentally. The collection of stories first start off with a...

Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power. Plato created “Allegory of the Cave” to define the structure of society and illustrate the pursuit of knowledge—or lack thereof. On the other hand, James Joyce’s “Eveline” portrays a more...

Vexation and disillusionment are prevalent themes in many of the stories in Dubliners, but male frustration is arguably strongest in two of those stories: Araby and Counterparts. In these stories, Joyce portrays male frustration in different...

As a homeless man once professed on LA local news after being robbed for the sixth consecutive week, “When we are beaten down, we must always remember that God shall always be waiting as our crutch”. While the words are moving, they are certainly...

Joycean critics frequently encourage the uninitiated to read Joyce with an emotional detachment. Scholars are taught to marvel at the aesthetic complexity of his prose with an “almost religious attitude”, under the dictatorial guidance of...

Joyce’s presentation of friendship focusses upon what is expected of it and how one wishes to experience it, contrasted with what it really is and how one actually experiences it. While the narrator begins ‘The Sisters’ with a degree of openness:...

Sappho’s poetry in ‘If Not, Winter,’ is autobiographical firstly in the sense that anything anyone writes is autobiographical, as one’s narrative inclinations are very telling of that person’s focus and preoccupations; secondly in the sense that...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an uneasy place within the tradition of the bildungsroman. Critics contemporary to Joyce recognized the novel’s preoccupation with growth while acknowledging its dissimilarity to more conventional...

Joyce's depiction of women is characterized by a high degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. The self-consciousness emerges as an awareness of both genre and linguistic expectations. contrasting...

...His mother said:

-O, Stephen will apologise.

Dante said:

-O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.

This capsule of utterance, which comes at the climax of the short first passage (or first independent "poem" of the book, as Fisher...

The Christmas dinner scenes divisive political and moral debate in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underlines an essential obstacle to the artistic mind of Stephen Dedalus. Ireland imposes a set of oppressive binariesnamely in the form of...

A caterpillar must crawl, inch by inch, across the earth before it can mature, grow wings, and soar beautifully above the land in which it was born. So too, in James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist as a Young Man, must the central character,...

In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Stephan Dedalus's evolving image of the female derives from his shifting and inconsistent perspective on religion and spirituality. Whichever religious belief he holds during each adolescent phase is...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, if nothing else, a record of the psychological journeys of Stephen Dedalus as he progresses from child to adult, unlearned rural boy to intellectual student, sinner to saint to artist. Stephen's level of...

Roy Disney explains that "It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." This is an important theme for the characters of Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of Frank McCourt from...

Ireland: for centuries, dreamers and tourists have associated it with rolling green hills, misty, cool fog, smiling, barefoot peasants, moss-covered castles built of stone, and haunting Celtic songs. This romantic picture may suit the foreigner,...

Imagination is the individual’s ability to create mental images through his perception of reality. It is an indispensable artistic tool that allows humans to express themselves creatively; it separates us from other living creatures. In A Portrait...

Joyce’s and Bennett’s writing have become synonymous with the arduous process of becoming an adult, and, despite the large gulf in time between their works’ publication, use some similar techniques to describe the process. However, Bennett’s ‘The...

In his 1987 study The Way of the World, literary scholar Franco Moretti states that the Bildungsroman “stands out as the most obvious of the (few) reference points available in that irregular expanse we call the “novel””. Indeed, while the reader...

Artists such as Lily Briscoe from To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and Stephen Dedalus from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are equally affected by the ways in which society interprets their art. They embody these two...

After witnessing the development of the young, unsophisticated Stephen Dedalus into the skeptical and scrupulous artist that concludes James Joyce’s antecedent novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his reappearance in Ulysses suggests that...