Now considered canonical, there was a time when Dubliners risked being dismissed as unpublishable. The centenary in 2014 of the publication of Dubliners appears, with the benefit of hindsight, to be several years overdue. Though completed in manuscript when James Joyce was twenty-five, the book was not published until the author had turned thirty-three. That delay in getting the book into print provides a clue to why Dubliners represents such a significant landmark in the history of modern short fiction, for it was radical in both form and content. The scenes of provincial urban life depicted have only become more…