A Study Of The Construction Of Irishness In Dubliners From The Perspective Of Imagined Community

James Joyce(1882-1941)is a famous Irish writer and poet in the 20 th century.He leads a vagrant life throughout the lifetime,earning a living by teaching English and writing.In his later years,he suffers from eye diseases and is nearly blind.He has a great affection for Ireland all his life and creates literary works closely about Dublin.His works are complicated in structure,strange in language and ingenious in conception.Dubliners,a collection of 15 short stories published in 1914,is divided into four parts represented by childhood,adolescence,maturity,and public life.It describes the daily life of lower-class citizens and shows the destruction of people’s ideals and hopes by social environment.In the history,Ireland suffers great trauma.Ireland in James Joyce’s writing takes on different images,but generally a paralyzed image.Lots of Irish scholars in his time believe that Joyce betrays his motherland because he mainly writes the negative sides of Dublin.But in the author’s point of view,Joyce harbors good expectations and hope for Ireland.Through writing paralysis,he aims to urge the Dubliners to awake from the spiritual paralysis,enabling Irish people to see themselves and their society more clearly,making them aware of their situations,and pushing them out of their inaction.This thesis selects one episode respectively from each part to analyze.It is found that there is a progressive relation among these stories.It firstly focuses on “Araby” and “A Little Cloud”.Through analyzing the depiction of the cityscape in “Araby”,it mainly explores how Joyce create a paralyzed and blue Dublin city,and further reveals the protagonist’s absence of belongings to this community.Then through the analysis of “A Little Cloud”,it mainly explores the protagonist’s mental changes towards the imagined London from anticipation to disappointment.Secondly it focuses on “A Painful Case” and “The Dead”,starting from the “simultaneity” under the imagined community theory,it aims to see how modern media tightly bind the Irish group together through a simultaneous reading.Then through analyzing the traditional Irish culture and the landscape of the west in “The Dead”,it mainly examines the significance of traditional culture and landscape for Irish people to construct their own identity,and even for the construction of national identity.Interpreting from the perspective of imagined community,the thesis illustrates that the dilemma and resistance the characters encountered in life manifests Joyce’s strong urge for the Dubliners to change the situation and reclaim their Irishness.Hopefully,this research will make some contributions to the future studies on Joyce and his novels.