Rethinking Joyce's Dubliners

Book excerpt: This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce’s famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book. Challenging these canonical notions about mobility, paralysis, identity, and gender in Joyce’s work, the ten essays here suggest that Dubliners is full of incredible movement. By embracing this paradigm shift, current and future scholars can open themselves up to the possibility of seeing that movement, maybe even noticing it for the first time, can yield surprisingly fresh twenty-first-century readings.