The year of Joyce's birth, 1882, was also the year in which several other contributors to modernism were born (Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Igor Stravinsky, Georges Braque, Mina Loy, and futurist Umberto Boccioni), but the world into which he was born was light years away from the intimations of international modernism. Dublin was then still the second city of the British Empire, and the coincidental birth in 1882 of Eamon de Valera, who would eventually rule over an independent Ireland, is far more germane to the provincial Irish environment in which Joyce was reared. His family was Roman Catholic and his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, had property in his native city of Cork; but the family fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse during Joyce's childhood. John Joyce had allied himself politically with Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary party that sought home rule for Ireland, and the divorce scandal in 1881 that destroyed Parnell's career also cost Joyce's father his patronage job. The economic decline of the bourgeois Joyces is caustically traced in Stephen Dedalus's description in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of his father as a "medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past." Mary Jane Murray, Joyce's mother, was a devout Catholic who had hoped for a clerical vocation for her oldest son, and her death when James Joyce was only twenty-one signaled the end of the disrupted and impoverished family, which included at least ten children who had survived infancy.
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