An urban legend revisited
JAMES JOYCE’S collection of short stories, Dubliners, is the subject of the One City, One Book Festival in the capital this year. Joyce was only 23 years old when he first tried to get Dubliners published. It was a torturous saga that concluded with its publication nine years later, in 1914.
The portrait he paints of Edwardian Dublin, of stultifying, dreary lives, of the anxiety of being trapped in a bourgeois world, or tending to its needs in the servant classes, is mature and modern, particularly for its insight into middle-aged angst. It was a remarkable feat of the imagination, which even hints — in An Encounter — about paedophilia.
