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 twentieth-century literature. Joyce evidently conceived of the Irish as his primary readers for Dubliners, and these Irish readers were the inhabitants of a particular historical context - the early twentieth-century Dublin of Joyce's youth. Joyce intended Dubliners to be realistic and revelatory. The course will consider Dubliners' innovations of style and substance, studying the individual stories against the background of the context of the Ireland he so uncompromisingly addressed in the struggle for what he termed 'the spiritual liberation of my country'. The required course reading is Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000).