Overview

This book suggests that James Joyce, like Yeats and his fellow Revivalists, was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom. It shows how his acute historical sensibility is reflected in Dubliners, posing new questions about one of the most enduring collections of short stories ever written. The answers provided are a fusion of history and literary criticism, using close readings that balance techniques of realism and symbolism. The result is an original study that shines new light on Dubliners and Joyce’s later masterpieces.

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9781781380024

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This is a sparklingly written and unflaggingly enjoyable book, founded on a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of Joyce and his times. -- Bernard O'Donoghue Who would think that a new study of James Joyce's first book could break fresh ground? Frank Shovlin has done it. His riveting book on Dubliners shows that Joyce began at his best. After the power and beauty of his short stories, Joyce had nowhere to go except into complexity and length. Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories, was published in Dublin in 1914 after a long struggle by Joyce, who had been living in Trieste, far from the Celtic mists, for ten years. The Dead , which Joyce wrote in 1907, may be his first masterpiece. It tells of Gabriel Conroy, a stout, tallish young man , returning with his wife Gretta to the Dublin hotel where they are to spend the night following a Christmas party. Full of desire, Gabriel finds his wife, who is from the west of Ireland, lost in reverie. What is she thinking about? She answers swiftly: The Lass of Aughrim (Aughrim being a city south of Galway). Jealous, Gabriel probes further. Gretta says she is thinking of someone she used to know who sang that song. Who was he? A young man from Galway who stood in her garden in the rain and sang it. And where is he now? 'He is dead' she said at length. And what did he die of? I think he died for me is her answer. His name was Michael Furey, a boy from the gasworks with a very good voice, who stood shivering in her grandmother's garden the night before she was to leave Galway for Dublin, and sang The Lass of Aughrim under Gretta's window. The story ends with Gabriel's realization, as the snow falls over Ireland, that he can never compete with this dead rival and that the time had come to journey westward to see Gretta's part of Ireland, which she wants to see again and which is unknown to him. Shovlin, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, contends in Journey Westward that critical analysis of Dubliners is still in its infancy. If so, he has advanced it towards maturity. His book calls attention to what is generally unrecognized: Joyce's nationalist sympathies. He traces throughout Dubliners the desire for revenge against the imperialist conqueror. Joyce, he says, felt outside the mainstream of the Irish Literary revival led by Protestants, notably Lady Gregory. He interprets The Lass of Aughrim as serving for Joyce as a perfect allegory for the unhappy relationship between Ireland and England: a female Ireland seduced and abandoned by a male England. He picks out the hints of death scattered throughout The Dead such as the names of the hostesses, the Misses Morkan, of the party attended by Gabriel. Joyce, says Shovlin, would have known that in Danish Morke means darkness . He also calls attention to the sharp class distinctions in The Dead , which opens with Gabriel arriving at the party and greeting Lily, the caretaker's daughter. Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname. Shovlin maintains that by capturing Lily's rural accent, making Conroy into Conerroy , Joyce manages to suggest King Conaire, the mythical king of Tara. Shovlin's book is entertaining as well as scholarly. He notes that throughout Dubliners Joyce always uses the Scottish spelling whisky rather than the Irish whiskey . That does not mean that Joyce himself drank whisky, rather that he was using the same spelling as provincial brands, such as Persse's Galway Whisky, rather than the spelling with an e adopted by Dublin distilleries in the nineteenth century. The dominant imagery of distillation is analogous, Shovlin argues, to Joyce's artistic process. In time, Shovlin suggests, Dubliners may come to be read as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake already are - with reference books the size of telephone directories to hand. His own fine book deserves to be in the pile, combining insight with brevity. In future, however, he should take care to avoid the split infinitive. To covertly locate and to formally celebrate Bloomsday do not belong in a book about the perfectionist James Joyce. -- Brenda Maddox Times Literary Supplement 20121026 Who would think that a new study of James Joyce's first book could break fresh ground? Frank Shovlin has done it. His riveting book on 'Dubliners' shows that Joyce began at his best. After the power and beauty of his short stories, Joyce had nowhere to go except into complexity and length. -- Brenda Maddox Times Literary Supplement 20121026

Author Information

Frank Shovlin is Professor of Irish Literature in English at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. He is the editor of The Letters of John McGahern (2021) and is working on McGahern's authorized biography.

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