Subsequent stories deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The stories centre on Joyce’s idea of an epiphany: a moment when a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by converging ideas and influences. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. James Joyce‘s first major work, Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by Joyce, first published in 1914, by Grant Richards Ltd. The unfinished Stephen Hero was published after his death. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce completely rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was a fictional rendering of Joyce’s youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this work. He decided, on his 22nd birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called Stephen Hero.

On 7 January 1904, Joyce attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected by the free-thinking magazine Dana. His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. He contributed to the modernistavant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce ( 1882 – 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic.

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