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    A Study Guide for James Joyce's "The Sisters"
    A Study Guide for James Joyce's "The Sisters"
    A Study Guide for James Joyce's "The Sisters"
    Ebook37 pages25 minutes

    A Study Guide for James Joyce's "The Sisters"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for James Joyce's "The Sisters," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535839556
    A Study Guide for James Joyce's "The Sisters"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for James Joyce's "The Sisters" - Gale

      11

      The Sisters

      James Joyce

      1914

      Introduction

      Best known as a novelist and modernist icon, James Joyce wrote only one collection of short stories, Dubliners. The volume was first published in England in 1914 and in the United States in 1916. The Sisters, the story that opens the collection, first appeared in rough draft form in the Irish Homestead on August 13, 1904. It was Joyce's first published work of fiction. In fact, the early version took less than a month to write, as it was composed upon a request made by Irish Homestead editor George Russell in July 1904. The final version of The Sisters is a brief but poignant story about a boy whose mentor, Catholic priest Father James Flynn, has died. The ordinariness of the events surrounding the death come as a shock to the boy, as do the rumors hinting at a scandal in his mentor's past. The events and the social decorum required for the wake must be observed and endured, but beneath these constraints, the boy feels a baffling sense of freedom. The tale, like Joyce's famed novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, can be read as a coming-of-age story, but it is also a tale of grief and a critique of the Catholic Church. The story is a pivotal and formative work of fiction from a prominent modernist author. Dubliners has remained in print for nearly a century, and a 2006 Norton edition is readily available.

      Author Biography

      Joyce was born February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, the son of tax collector John Stanislaus and pianist Mary Jane Murray. The eldest of ten surviving children, Joyce was raised in a middle-class family that began to decline in both wealth and power over the course of his childhood. Joyce began writing at an early age, composing a poem critical of the Catholic Church when he was only nine years old. Catholicism and religion were highly influential in Joyce's life; he was educated as a boy by Jesuits (a Catholic order of priests and monks), attending first Clogowes Wood College and then Belvedere College. Joyce later attended University College Dublin, graduating with a degree in modern languages in

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