For many readers, the short story enters its distinctively modern phase with the publication of James Joyce's Dubliners (1914). Certainly, the book has garnered more attention than any other volume of short fiction in the English language; meanwhile the descriptions Joyce gave of his own aesthetic principles and compositional practices – in particular the concept of the ‘epiphany’ and the development of an ascetic prose style of ‘scrupulous meanness’ – have come to occupy a central place in scholarly accounts of the short form in the twentieth century. Yet while the publication date of Dubliners, 1914, may locate the text within the high-tide of European modernism, it is important to remember that work began on the stories as early as 1904, and that the book was complete, but for ‘The Dead’, by 1906. The literary environment in which Dubliners was composed, then, was not that of the high-modernist literary manifesto, the ‘little’ magazine, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; rather Joyce's reading was concentrated (often antagonistically) in the literature of the Irish Cultural Revival and, as the decidedly decadent-sounding title he gave to an early project, Silhouettes, suggests, the British fin-de-siècle avant-garde.

By relocating Dubliners to the period in which it was composed we are able to take a more measured appraisal of it than is usual in modernist criticism. For it is a mistake to think of the book as a one-off, stand-alone work of superlative genius that came from nowhere and changed the course of short fiction.