James Joyce and his fellow Dubliners

James Joyce is counted among the most renowned Irish writers. His fiction includes Stephen Hero, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. Throughout these books, he explores the city of Dublin and its inhabitants, especially their inner side. This concentration on his characters' minds, thoughts, feelings, etc, eventually led Joyce to be one of the best exponents of the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique.

 In Dubliners, this is not his main stylistic concern yet; the stories in this book show a type of psychological realism instead, in which the narrator depicts in great detail the spiritual realm of characters. Joyce himself said ne that Dubliners is a series of chapters in the moral history of his community, and the arrangement of the tales reveals "a progression from childhood to maturity, broadening from private to public scope". (Harry Levin, The Portable James Joyce).