'When you think that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years,' James Joyce once wrote his brother, 'that it is the 'second' city of the British Empire . . . that it is nearly three times as big as Venice, it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.'
In Dubliners, completed when Joyce was only twenty-five, we are given a definitive group portrait. It is a book, as Terence Brown writes in his stimulating Introduction, 'rooted in an intensely accurate apprehension of the …