Originally he had 10 stories in mind: “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” “The Boarding House,” “After the Race,” “Eveline,” “Clay,” “Counterparts,” “A Painful Case,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “A Mother.” Toward the end of 1905, before he sent the collection to the London publisher Grant Richards, Joyce added two more stories-“Araby” and, what was then the final story, “Grace.” During 1906, he wrote “Two Gallants” and “A Little Cloud,” which he submitted to Richards along with a revision of “The Sisters,” thus expanding the number of stories to 14.Īlmost immediately after agreeing to bring out the stories, however, Richards began to voice objections to portions of Joyce’s writing. It was a searing analysis of Irish middle- and lower-middle-class life, with Dublin not simply as its geographical setting but as the emotional and psychological locus as well.

Though he finished the final story, “The Dead,” in spring of 1907, difficulties in finding a publisher and Joyce’s initial refusal to alter any passage thought to be objectionable kept it from being published by Grant Richards until 1914.įrom their inception, Joyce intended the stories to be part of a thematically unified and chronologically ordered series. This is the title that Joyce gave to his collection of 15 short stories written over a three-year period (1904–07).

The dead james joyce analysis