Joyce explains his purpose and intention behind writing the collection: Dublin, to Joyce, seemed to be the centre of paralysis, which he explains in a letter to Grant Richards, who was the publisher of Dubliners. The short stories, set in Dublin, capture some of the most unhappy moments in life. Epiphanies in Dubliners Dublinersĭubliners by James Joyce is a collection of short stories published in June 1914. In the Greek New Testament manuscripts, epiphaneia refers also to Christ's second coming. Early Christians adopted the term to describe the manifestation of the child, Jesus to the Magi, which was understood figuratively as the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles and commemorated in the Catholic Feast of Epiphany, celebrated January 6. In ancient Greek usage, the term often describes the visible manifestation of a god or goddess to mortal eyes, a form of theophany. The word "epiphany" descends from the ancient Greek ἐπῐφᾰ́νειᾰ (epipháneia), meaning a "manifestation or appearance." The word is built from the Greek words "pha" (to shine), "phanein" (to show, to cause to shine), and "epiphanein" (to manifest, to bring to light). Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the rise of epiphany in modernist art as a reaction against the rise of a “commercial-industrial-capitalist society” during the early twentieth century. Joycean or modernist epiphany has its roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially the Wordsworthian "spots of time," as well as the sudden spiritual insights that formed the basis of traditional spiritual autobiography. Scholars used Joyce's term to describe a common feature of the modernist novel, with authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Katherine Mansfield all featuring these sudden moments of vision as an aspect of the contemporary mind. In similar terms, Joyce experimented with epiphany throughout his career, from the short stories he wrote between 18 which were central to his early work, to his late novel Finnegans Wake (1939). They become the basis of Stephen's theory of aesthetic perception as well as his writing. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." Stephen's epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception in the trivial aspects of everyday Dublin life, non-religious and non-mystical in nature. Author James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero (1904-1906), an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The term has a more specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction. Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world.
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