A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Book Description

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist’s ‘eternal imagination’.

From the Back Cover

Published in 1916, ‘A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’ follows the progress of Stephen Dedalus from infancy to early manhood. The richness of the language and Joyce’s mastery of literary style as he describes the Dedalus family, young Stephen’s education by the Jesuits, his sexual awakening, his intellectual development and his eventual revolt against the religion in which he has been raised have ensured the novel’s place as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.

John Lynch has appeared in ‘Cal, Railway Station Man’ and ‘Hardware.’ –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark novel which perfected his stream of consciousness technique and combined nearly every literary device available in a modern re-telling of The Odyssey. Other major 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), and his complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Joyce was born to a lower-middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College, Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Z³rich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce’s fictional universe does not extend beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.