primary concern of his to move to a different style, a more radical experiment on language and a
deeper reflection on the artistic creation.
The last tale of Dubliners opens to the broader themes of Joyce’s later works, notably Ulysses and
50
Finnegan’s Wake .
In a linear and yet circular way, the first short story, ‘The Sisters’, opens with the line ‘There was
51
no hope for him’ and with a young boy entrapped in a confusing, dark world. The first-person
narrator becomes a third-person one in ‘The Dead’, proceeding from the particular to the universal,
and offering a perhaps unprecedented hopeful and positive key of reading to the whole collection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Joyce, Dubliners , ed. by Paolo Bertinetti, Penguin Classics (Genoa, Italy, 1995).
A. Goldman, The Joyce Paradox, Form and Freedom in his Fiction (University of Michigan, 1966).
A. Nestrovski, ‘Joyce’s Critique of Music’, in Perspectives of New Music , vol. 29, n. 1 (1991), pp.
6-47.
F. Fordham, I do I undo I redo, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2010).
J. Epstein, ‘Joyce’s Phoneygraphs: Music, Meditation, and Noise Unleashed’, in James Joyce
Quarterly , vol. 48, n° 2 University of Tulsa (Tulsa, 2011), pp. 265-289.
J. Feely, ‘Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and the Browning Quotation’, in James Joyce Quarterly , vol. 20, n° 1
University of Tulsa (Tulsa, 1982), pp. 87-96.
J. Morgan, ‘Queer Choirs: Sacred Music, Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, and the Sexual Politics of Victorian
Aestheticism’, in James Joyce Quarterly , vol. 37 n. ½, University of Tulsa (Tulsa, 2000), pp.
127-151.
J. V. Kelleher, ‘Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’’, in The Review of
Politics , vol. 27, n. 3 Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 414-433.
M. Beja, ed. by, James Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Selection
of Critical Essays , MacMillan Education LTD (Hong Kong, 1987).
M. Dowling, ‘‘Thought-Tormented Music’: Joyce and the Music of Irish Revival’, in James Joyce
Quarterly , Vol. 45, n° ¾, University of Tulsa (Tulsa, 2008), pp. 437-458.
M. Norris, Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners” , University of Pennsylvania Press,
(Philadelfia, 2003).
M. T. Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination, Princeton University Press (Princeton,
1981).
P. K. Saint-Amour, ‘Christmas Yet to Come’: Hospitality, Futurity, the Carol, and ‘The Dead’’, in
Representations , vol. 98 n° 1, University of California Press (Oakland, 2007), pp. 93-117.
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Joyce begins the process of ‘doing, undoing and redoing’ that is at the core of the Modernist Aesthetic. See F.
Fordham, I do I undo I redo, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2010).
51
J. Joyce, ‘The Sisters’, p. 3.