![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Written in 1907, “The Dead” displays all the virtuosity of an author who can already do anything he wants in conventional fiction. He sought for years to find a reliable publisher for the collection eventually released, in 1914, as “Dubliners”. In that Italian city, ruled then like the Dublin he had left by a haughty imperial power (Austro-Hungary rather than Great Britain), the self-exiled Joyce lived and wrote. Astonishingly, it came from the pen of an impoverished and insecure 25-year-old language teacher in Trieste. “The Dead” is among the finest short stories in the English language. His snow unites past and present, memory and desire, as it blankets “all the living and the dead”. Joyce’s tale concludes (freakishly, in purely meteorological terms) with snowfall “general all over Ireland”. ![]() Although the writer got no credit from the advertising agency, this panorama of longing and nostalgia draws on James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. ALMOST EVERYONE who watches television in Ireland will have seen a Christmas commercial for Guinness-first aired in 2004-in which snowflakes drop softly over a variety of Irish landscapes. ![]()
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