' An Encounter' – Two schoolboys playing truant encounter a perverted, middle-aged man.

' The Sisters' – After the priest Father Flynn dies, a young boy who was close to him hears some less-than-flattering stories about the father.

He returned to submitting the manuscript to other publishers, and in 1914 Grant Richards once again agreed to publish the book, using the page proofs saved from Maunsel as copy. Joyce offered to pay the printing costs himself if the sheets were turned over to him and he was allowed to complete the job elsewhere and distribute the book, but, when he arrived at the printers, they refused to surrender the sheets and burned them the next day, though Joyce managed to save one copy, which he obtained 'by ruse'. A similar controversy developed, and Maunsel too refused to publish the collection, even threatening to sue Joyce for printing costs already incurred.

Joyce thereupon resubmitted the manuscript to other publishers, and, about three years later (1909), he found a willing candidate in Maunsel & Roberts of Dublin. Under protest, Joyce eventually agreed to some of the requested changes, but Richards ended up backing out of the deal anyway. Its printer, however, refused to set one of the stories (' Two Gallants'), and Richards then began to press Joyce to remove a number of other passages that he claimed the printer also refused to set. The London house of Grant Richards agreed to publish it in 1905. Publication history īetween 1905, when Joyce first sent a manuscript to a publisher, and 1914, when the book was finally published (on June 15), Joyce submitted the book 18 times to a total of 15 publishers. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appeared in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses. The first three stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, while the subsequent stories are written in the third person and deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people, in line with Joyce's division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. They centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany (a moment where a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination) and the theme of paralysis (Joyce felt Irish nationalism stagnated cultural progression, placing Dublin at the heart of a regressive movement). The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.

The sisters dubliners