Success in a Shattered World For James Joyce, the year the world was thrown into turmoil was also the beginning of his success as a writer, with the publication of his short-story collection Dubliners-which examines the middle-class Irish Catholics known to himself and his family-and the completion of his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), as well as his beginning to work on Ulysses.

(They eventually legalized their marriage in a civil ceremony in 1931.) In the decade between 1904 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Joyce and Nora lived principally in Trieste, Italy, where he taught English. She would remain his companion for the rest of his life on the Continent and they would have two children together, although he refused to marry in a religious ceremony. When he left Ireland permanently in 1904 for Italy, Joyce took with him a young woman, Nora Barnacle. Teaching English in Italy His mother's serious illness caused his return home in 1903. Joyce, however, was determined to establish himself in the European mainstream, believing that he could not function as an artist in Ireland and that the only suitable response he could make was to be an exile. Many fellow Irish writers chose to dramatize this quest for freedom in their work. In his home country, the Irish, persecuted for centuries by the British, were pushing aggressively for independence from British rule. He also cautiously accepted the necessity of writing in the tongue of the conquerors in order to broaden his intellectual perspectives. Unlike many Irish writers of the period, who rejected the literature of England, Joyce was sensitive to the major achievement of the English literary tradition that spanned the eight centuries in which Ireland was under English rule and the accomplishment of William Shakespeare within that tradition. Both the strong nationalism, with its emphasis on the revived Gaelic language, and the accompanying mysticism were unacceptable to him. He viewed the flourishing Irish literary revival with a mixture of anxiety and indifference. He was the eldest of what his father estimated as “sixteen or seventeen children,” only ten of whom survived infancy.Īfter graduating from University College Dublin in 1902, Joyce left Ireland for medical school in Paris. One Child among Many in Dublin, an Irish Exile in Paris James Augustus Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, to John Stanislaus

Works in Biographical and Historical Context His short-story collection and three novels redefined the form of modern fiction and have inspired countless writers in his wake. James Joyce is considered the most prominent English-speaking literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

James joyce short stories