James Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, perhaps most prominently stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism.

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by Joyce, first published in 1914. They form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by converging ideas and influences. The stories centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany: a moment when a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce's novel Ulysses. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists. Subsequent stories deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This aligns with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and maturity.

"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners，which touches on a great number of themes:coming of age, meeting of imagination with reality, the loss of innocence, the life of the mind versus poverty (both physical and intellectual), the consequences of idealization and the pain that often comes when one encounters love in reality instead of its elevated form. These themes build on one another entirely through the thoughts of the young boy, who is portrayed by the first-person narrator, who writes from memory. Among later writers influenced by "Araby" was John Updike, whose oft-anthologized short story, "Aamp;P", is a 1960s American reimagining of Joyce's tale of a young man, lately the wiser for his frustrating infatuation with a beautiful but inaccessible girl. Her allure has excited him into confusing his emergent sexual impulses for those of honor and chivalry, and brought about disillusionment and a loss of innocence.

Nevertheless, compared with other famous literature, the number of papers and researches concerning Araby is rather small, no matter at home or abroad, not to mention researches of near-term. Hence,the author will probe into several division of this novel and analyze potential themes from the perspective of psychological changes and the influence factors of psychological changes such as social factors, character factors and so on.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

This paper consists of four chapters. The first chapter is about the original figure of Paul at the beginning of the story, when he did not met Mangan’s sister yet. The second chapter is about when he knew about Mangan’s sister and then the emergency of his obscure feelings to Mangan’s sister. The third chapter is about the psychological changes of Paul at the period of his buying gifts from Araby. The fourth chapter is about the epiphany of Paul at the end of the story. Each chapter is analyzed from the perspective of psychological changes and the influence factors of psychological changes such as social factors, character factors and so on.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the psychological changes of Paul in different period of time, which revealing the social background and the literary atmosphere of that time. Especially, this paper concerns on the application approach of “epiphany” in Araby through the psychological changes of Paul in various images. All in all, the theme of a loss of innocence, coming of age, meeting of imagination with reality and the consequences of idealization and the pain will be discussed in this research paper.

[1]Arianna Nicole Jarvis,Taking a break:Preliminary

investigations into the psychology of epiphanies as discontinuous change experiences(January 1,1996).

[2]Joyce,James.“Araby.”Ed.M.H.Abrama.The Northon Anthology of English Literature:Volume 2.New York:W.