James Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

After he left his native Ireland at age 24 for the European mainland, James Joyce was able, with difficulty, to establish himself as a key figure in the modernist avant-garde literary movement that flowered in the years before and after World War I. Living in Trieste and teaching English, in 1914 Joyce was finally able to publish Dubliners (Penguin Books,1993 or 2014 Centennial edition), his collection of fifteen stories that depict middle-class life in Ireland in the early twentieth century. Two years later, he brought out A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books,1993), a semi-autobiographical novel he had started years earlier. Controversial at the time, these two volumes cemented Joyce's reputation as a master innovator in the dual realms of content and language. In this study group, we will assess how these works have influenced countless writers over the 100 years since their publication. Join us for discussion and analysis of these remarkable works.