James Joyce's 'scrupulous meanness': style, text and context in Dubliners

Joyce identified the style of his short story collection Dubliners as one of ‘scrupulous meanness’. The book’s diminished subject matter, along with its employment of the epiphany (a term coined by Joyce), and its deliberate lack of evident authorial intrusion which allows its characters inadvertently to reveal their truths, marked the beginning of a new style in 20th-century literature. The course will consider Dubliners’ innovations of style and substance, studying the individual stories partly through the historical and cultural context of Joyce’s time.