![]() He also learnt Norwegian to be able to read Henrik Ibsen’s works in their original language. In 1898, Joyce entered University College Dublin to study English, French and Italian. He still retained an interest in religion and was strongly influenced by rationalist Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas. However, Joyce was a free thinker and spent his time reading books not approved of by the Jesuits increasingly he became sceptical of the Catholic Church and the Irish establishment. Joyce did well academically and was twice elected to be president of the Marian Society. However, he later received a scholarship to the Jesuit, Belvedere College. Joyce was removed from that school and began to study at home with his mother. However, although receiving good income, his father was disorganised and dissolute – frittering away money on alcohol. ![]() His father was delighted his young son and praised Parnell because, like many Irishmen, his father was unhappy at Parnell’s treatment by the British and Catholic Church and the refusal to grant home rule.ĭespite being one of ten children, James Joyce was sent to a prestigious Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. Aged only nine years old he wrote a poem about the Irish republican leader Charles Stewart Parnell. He appeared to be politically aware from a young age. Joyce grew up in a time when there were strong calls for Irish home rule and a new sense of national identity was being created. His parents were middle-class Catholics and his father was employed as a rent collector. James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, in Rathgar, Dublin. He grew up in Dublin, Ireland, but spent his later life in Europe. This avant-garde style enabled Joyce to develop unique characterisations and touch on the inmost parts of human emotions and thoughts. Joyce developed a unique, innovative style that included writing with wit, humour and a stream of consciousness. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.James Joyce – was an influential modernist writer who was famed for his short stories and novels, in particular, Ulysees (1922) which recounted aspects of the Odyssey in modern terms. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. His reputation largely rests on just four works: a short story collection Dubliners (1914), and three novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).įor more discussion of James Joyce, see our analysis of Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’, our commentary on ‘The Sisters’, our summary of ‘Clay’, and our introduction to free indirect speech. James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the most important modernist writers of the early twentieth century. Like many a modernist story, it is open-ended even when, like the street where the narrator lives, it appears to have reached its dead end. ‘Araby’, then, is a story about frustration and failure, but it ends on a note of ‘anguish and anger’, without telling us what will befall the narrator and the girl who haunts his dreams. There are many such moments in this shortest of short stories which repay close analysis for the way the young narrator romanticises, but does not sentimentalise, the feeling of being in love, perhaps hopelessly. This is a true but also heightened in its romanticism: true because it captures what it is to be in love with a special person, especially when in the first flushes of adolescence.īut it is also romantic in the extreme because of the religious and courtly idea (nay, ideal) of love present in that idea of being the girl’s cupbearer (‘I bore my chalice’), the crying (but then, the disarmingly direct parenthetical admission of not knowing why), and the romantic idea of Old Ireland inscribed in that harp, which also carries a frisson of the erotic (with the girl’s words and gestures acting like the finger’s touches all over the boy’s body). But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.
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