James Joyce sincerely believed that his short story collection, Dubliners, the greatest in the language, could remedy the paralysis he diagnosed in Ireland. “I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country,” he told his reluctant publisher, Grant Richards, in 1906, eight years before the book finally appeared.
Joyce himself never repeated anything as a writer. What followed Dubliners, though, was a century of Irish short stories all hopelessly in its wake: so many beautifully turned tales of restricted, confined lives, on the one hand, and of grievous displacement on the other, escapes that are no escape.
