Textual Analysis of James Joyce’s Dubliners: A Fanonian Reading

This research paper explores Joyce’s textual resistance to the Celtic Revivalism and the Irish Catholic conservatism in Dubliners (1914). Using postcolonial theories like the one proposed by Frantz Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth (1968), the research shows that in writing Dubliners, Joyce, unlike the Irish Revivalist authors and conservative Catholics, was more interested in showing the imperial force or power in all shades, and put the blame on the lethargy of people when it needs to be placed, whether on imperial Britain, the Revivalist authors or the Irish Catholic conservatism. The paper also makes the case that if the colonial pathology of paralysis is the central theme of Joyce’s Dubliners, nevertheless, the power to resist or the resistance strain against this pathology is another essential idea explored by Joyce in his collection of short stories.