Exiles: A Play in Three Acts

About

Joyce's only play (1918) is a deeply Ibsenite work — in construction, theme, and tone — that follows a writer recently returned from exile to Dublin, testing his wife's love and his friend's honesty through a psychological triangle that refuses easy resolution. The play lacks the linguistic brilliance of Dubliners or Ulysses — its language is deliberately flat, its method of maximum compression and indirection — but it has genuine dramatic intelligence, and the ending's refusal of conventional resolution is characteristic of Joyce's artistic honesty. It is essential reading for Joyce scholars and of real interest as a document of the period's most innovative writer working in an unfamiliar form.