Dubliners / A Portrait of the Author as a Young Man
James Joyce
(International Collectors Library, Jan. 1, 1967)
1967 hardcover, James Joyce (Finnegans Wake). In 1914, Joyce published Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories. In its representation of what one character calls "Dear dirty Dublin," the book is not only a picture of the city of Joyce's youth, it is also an illustration of the contrary impulses of the exiled artist. What is dear in Dublin stands in Joyce's vision alongside the dirty, and Joyce's tour of the city spares us nothing. The same "glow of a late autumn sunset" that covers green and lush walks also "cast[s] a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men". Published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce describes the formative years of the life of Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of the author and an allusion to the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology, Daedalus. - Amazon