Introduction Rethinking Dubliners: A Case for What Happens in Joyce’s Stories

Abstract

More than a century ago, James Joyce published Dubliners, and since then, readers, scholars, and academics have vigorously discussed and interpreted the stories and the collection from perspectives that have become by 2016, it seems to us, in need of reorientation. Readers have come not only to accept these readings, but also to internalize them, understanding them as a kind of gospel truth. In Rethinking “Dubliners,” the editors take up a challenge that Fritz Senn gave Joyceans at the end of the twentieth century, hoping to put “descriptive possibility” not just on the critical periphery of writing about Dubliners, but also at the front and center, as a necessary movement forward in scholarly approaches to Joyce’s famous stories. Moreover, in the centenary year of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and just over one hundred years after Joyce gave us our beloved short stories, we urge readers of Dubliners to reconsider the traditional tropes of paralysis and stagnation in favor of movement and change.