Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Individual
Group Discount
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews October 10, 2023 October 3, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan - Group Discount
Qty: 00
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
Many critics today credit Dubliners with being among the most accomplished collections of short stories ever, and certainly in the English language. Before James Joyce wrote Dubliners, short stories experienced a resurgence in the nineteenth century as the number of periodicals that printed short-form writing increased. This resurgence occurred almost simultaneously in Germany, France, Russia, and the United States. In the English-speaking world, perhaps the most important moment in the development of the modern short story was Edgar Allen Poe’s review of his fellow American Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. In this review, published in 1842, Poe asserted that the success of a short story relies on a unity of effect. To this end, “In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” Whether the story is realistic, seeking to present the world objectively, or impressionistic, seeking to present a character’s subjective perception of the world, Poe believed that an accomplished short story leaves the reader with “a sense of the fullest satisfaction.”
According to novelist and story writer William Boyd, the modern short story reached perfection in the work of the nineteenth-century Russian writer Anton Chekhov. What Boyd finds so remarkable about Chekhov’s stories is their stark, sometimes painful realism. Not only do Chekhov’s stories offer the unity of effect promoted by Poe, but they also produce a clear reflection of real life in all its imperfection. For this reason, Boyd argues, “Chekhov represents the end of the first phase of the modern short story. From his death onward, his influence is massive and ineluctable: the short story becomes thereafter in the 20th century almost exclusively Chekhovian.”
Read more about Chekhov's short stories.
This is where Joyce enters the history of the short story. Like many twentieth-century short-story writers, Joyce is decidedly Chekhovian. Like Chekhov, Joyce developed a rigorous realism. Also like Chekhov, Joyce dispensed with traditional plotting and left his readers to pass judgment on his characters. However, Joyce also put his own touches on the Chekhovian model. For one thing, Joyce invested his realist stories with symbolic significance, uniquely combining the directness of prose and the suggestiveness of poetry. To the author’s mind, this unique combination gave his stories a transformative potential. This is why Joyce often referred his stories as “epicleti.” Joyce took this term from the Catholic mass, where epiklesis refers to an invocation to the Holy Ghost to transform wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ. As Joyce explained in a letter to his brother, “there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the mass and what I am trying to do [in Dubliners] . . . to give people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own.”
In addition to developing short stories that functioned on both “real” and “symbolic” levels, Joyce also achieved something new in terms of how he shaped his stories into a collection. Perhaps no short story collection before or since has achieved such a unified effect as Dubliners. Most collections like Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, mentioned above, merely gather standalone stories that otherwise appeared individually in magazines and other publications. Other famous collections created a sense of unity through a frame story. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for example, features a motley crew of individuals who go on a pilgrimage together and hold a storytelling competition along the way. Despite the way Chaucer’s pilgrims respond to one another in their stories, The Canterbury Tales does not establish a unity of time and place the same way Dubliners does. In addition to the craft of his stories, then, Joyce’s main legacy in the history of the short story has been to find a way to stitch individual stories together in ways that produce a complex yet complete vision.
Please wait while we process your payment