By the time you read this, Radio 4's Book At Bedtime will have aired its fifth instalment of James Joyce's Dubliners, read, a little surprisingly, by Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea.

Good to know there are 15 more episodes still to go, marking this, the centenary of Dubliners' publication in June 1914. I can think of few better books with which to fill one's head before heading off into sleep.

A hundred years before Dubliners, in July 1814, another of the most seminal books in western fiction appeared. Waverley or Tis Sixty Years Since was published anonymously by Sir Walter Scott and, with its successors, altered the art of novel writing irrevocably. The passing of time and of attitudes, of language, class and perspective, could hardly be more marked than in the difference between Scott's thrilling Romance of the '45 Jacobite rising and Joyce's outwardly gentle but profoundly barbed stories set at the turn of the 20th century.

While historians can argue endlessly about the impact of economies and political manoeuvring on society, we surely get closer to the truth of what was going on in ordinary people's minds, and the impact world events were having on them, from the best novels of the era. Waverley was written during a period of alarming European conflict. The sentimental glories of the long-gone Jacobite rebels, who could no longer trouble anyone, was fertile fictional territory, allowing Scott to help shape and bolster a Scottish identity that had been wavering for a century and more by the time he took up his pen.

Dubliners, by contrast, was written by 1905, at a time of relative calm. Dogged by printers who refused to set certain passages from these stories, Joyce was obliged to return to Ireland from Trieste, where he and his wife had settled, to try to sort out matters. These took years to resolve, but when Dubliners was at last unleashed on the public, they had read nothing like it before. This, of course, was early days. Joyce's readers could not have anticipated what was yet to follow from their exiled literary genius.

Quiet, highly realistic stories, which minutely and sensuously evoke the stultifying Dublin middle class of Joyce's upbringing, Dubliners marches in steady progression from a child's-eye view in the eerie opener, Two Sisters, through an adolescent's outlook to an adult's, culminating in one of the author's most haunting achievements, the novella-length The Dead.

Read at this distance, these stories always surprise with their restraint and simplicity, so natural and plainly told it feels as if half their meaning is left unsaid. Like the young Picasso, Joyce began conventionally, before starting to experiment with form and voice, although even in these tales the clues to his future technique are already in evidence. As are several characters, who were to reappear in his later novels.

Much has been written about Joyce's high modern works - Ulysses, Finnegans Wake - and their influence on writers down the 20th century to today. Yet Dubliners has been no less a trailblazer. Any collection of short stories linked by place owes a direct debt to him, whether it's Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, in 1919, or Alan Spence's Its Colours They Are Fine, in 1977. You might even argue that the detective genre in which a city plays as big a role as the protagonists takes its cue from Joyce. In all these it is suggested that place shapes characters almost as profoundly as their times.

The controlled contempt, anger and boredom in Joyce's Dubliners was a clear declaration of independence. By the time the collection was being punted around publishers (15 in all), Joyce had decamped for Europe, spending the rest of his life far from the streets and families he so brilliantly evokes. After an unproductive visit in 1912, he never again returned. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were the work of a roaring imagination set loose to roam his far-distant boyhood terrain. Dubliners, meanwhile, was written with it right outside his window. It shows.