Reading Dubliners for the first time, someone could possibly expect Joyce to praise the city where he spent many of his formative years with an idyllic or pleasant homage, but instead he explores through dark and complex characterizations how the men and women of Dublin are made stagnant by their environment. . Joyce’s Dublin appears not as a city, but as a mother that swallows its young, a destructive vacuum of religious indoctrination and individual isolation that offers no exit. ( )

I really enjoyed these short stories, and I must say what I enjoyed most about this addition was the footnotes and critical essays. I have really gotten used to reading "classics" with explanatory footnotes and critical essays!

Of this short stories, I really enjoyed the last few dealing more with older and middle aged characters. I especially liked "A Mother" and "Grace".

Adrianne

Edit: After reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I have no interest in keeping this book and/or reading or rereading any of Joyce's works. ( )

First Joyce book and though some of the stories confused me a bit, I'd have to say I enjoyed it. Definately will read more by him and am very interested in reading a biography about him, James Joyce seemed like a very fascinating man. ( )

I recently reviewed the text of Dubliners when I read it in another edition, so this review is about the supplementary material that comes in the Norton Critical Edition, which is the reason I bought this (even though I already own another copy of the book). I love Nortons. They include contextual material and critical reviews, contemporary to when the story came out and more modern. After reading Dubliners on my own, and without the support of other people to discuss it with, I decided that I wanted to dig a little deeper.

The contextual materials here are different from other critical editions that I've read before, which generally consisted of articles or reviews of the book upon publication. Instead, the editor has amassed photographs and maps of Dublin from the period that Joyce was describing in his stories to help make the vivid stories even more concrete, along with a couple of earlier versions of some of them. The critical essays did not cover all of the stories, just eight of the fifteen, but they certainly address them from different angles. Some of the authors look at symbolic interpretations, others at political overlays, and one delves in to linguistic interpretations and how they reflect on the meaning of the story.

Definitely reading these essays made me reflect on the stories in Dubliners in new ways. I'm not going to spend time recapping the analysis in each article, because that is what the book is for. Suffice it to say that I appreciated the articles and the thoughts in them. This book was exactly what I wanted when I ordered it, a collection of excellent resources for better understanding a seminal work of literature. ( )