JOYCE, James

My job in a book like this is to distinguish the avant-garde Joyce from the more traditional writer. Finnegans Wake obviously belongs and, if only to measure its excellence, deserves a separate entry. For Joyce's stories, Dubliners (1914), the innovation was the concept of the epiphany, which is the revelatory moment, customarily appearing near the end, that would give meaning to the entire fiction. The epiphany is, in Christian terms, the showing forth of Jesus Christ's divinity to the...