都柏林人(Dubliners)简介：
This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader understand Joyce's use of textures, dialect, and symbols. Each of the beautifully written short stories in this collection precisely details a brief scene in the life of a resident of Dublin at the turn of the 20th century. Although the characters do not know each other, their experiences unfold along the same streets and often overlap thematically. Their tragedies mirror that of Ireland, a country struggling for political identity and held back, in Joyce's view, by rigid religious ideas and adherence to tradition. Joyce's great skill at dialect offers a sense of the city's complex social structure, while themes of isolation, emotional paralysis, violence, regret, and death run throughout the collection and link all of the stories. Chronologically, too, the stories appear to progress; portrayals of youthful confusion and disillusionment in the opening story, "The Sisters," become the haunting midlife meditations of "The Dead." Like his masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce's Dubliners displays consummate control of nuances, emotions, and images.

　该书完成于1905年，先后遭20多家出版商退稿。后在美国意象派诗人庞德的帮助与推荐下，作品于1914年正式出版发表。《都柏林人》由15个短篇小说结集而成，以现实主义的手法描绘了形形色色的都柏林下层市层平庸琐屑的生活图景。
　　瘫痪和死亡是贯穿小说集的主题。全书是依据“童年、青少年、成年和社会生活”四个阶段来安排故事顺序的。作品具有现实主义和自然主义的特点，同时也表现出象征主义的倾向。在最后的《死者》一篇中，面对死亡，人们获得了“精神感悟”，生与死的交融象征了都柏林社会与人类的虽死犹生。作品的主旨由此获得了升华。