Craig Hansen Werner writes in his book "Dubliners": A Pluralistic World that "the earliest critics of Dubliners were the editors and printers who seem to have shared a feeling that the book was in some sense obscene or dangerous." The collection did not, however, receive the antagonistic reception its publisher Grant Richards had feared. Although it tended to be eclipsed by what were considered Joyce's more radical works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Dubliners had a warm reception in the literary climate of the time. Werner notes that its most influential critic, Ezra Pound, praised the collection's "clear hard prose" and, like other critics, concentrated on its effective realism. In his book Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson calles the work "a straight work of Naturalistic fiction," which was the general view of Dubliners for twenty years.

One of the first critics...