A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning."

James Joyce’s supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also, in the apt phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann, nothing less than "the gestation of a soul." For as he describes the shabby, cloying, and sometimes terrifying Dublin upbringing of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce immerses the reader in his emerging consciousness, employing language that ranges from baby talk to hellfire sermon to a triumphant artist’s manifesto. The result is a novel of immense boldness, eloquence, and energy, a work that inaugurated a literary revolution and has become a model for the portrayal of the self in our time.

The text of this edition has been newly edited by Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and is followed by a new afterword, chronology, and bibliography by Richard Brown.

About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Perhaps Joyce’s most personal work, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man depicts the intellectual awakening of one of literature’s most memorable young heroes, Stephen Dedalus.  Through a series of brilliant epiphanies that parallel the development of his own aesthetic consciousness, Joyce evokes Stephen’s youth, from his impressionable years as the youngest student at the Clongowed Wood school to the deep religious conflict he experiences at a day school in Dublin, and finally to his college studies where he challenges the conventions of his upbringing and his understanding of faith and intellectual freedom.  James Joyce’s highly autobiographical novel was first published in the United States in 1916 to immediate acclaim.  Ezra Pound accurately predicted that Joyce’s book would "remain a permanent part of English literature," while H.G. Wells dubbed it "by far the most important living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing."  A remarkably rich study of a developing young mind, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man made an indelible mark on literature and confirmed Joyce’s reputation as one of the world’s greatest and lasting writers.

About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In his first and still most widely read novel, James Joyce makes a strange peace with the traditional narrative of a young man’s self-discovery by respecting its substance while exploding its form, thereby inaugurating a literary revolution.

Published in 1916 when Joyce was already at work on Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is exactly what its title says and much more. In an exuberantly inventive masterpiece of subjectivity, Joyce portrays his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, growing up in Dublin and struggling through religious and sexual guilt toward an aesthetic awakening. In part a vivid picture of Joyce’s own youthful evolution into one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, it is also a moment in the intellectual history of an age.

About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Published in 1916, James Joyce’s semiautobiographical tale of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel.

‘Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics,’ wrote Alfred Kazin. ‘He showed that the material of fiction could rest upon as tense a distribution and as delicate a balance of its parts as any poem. Joyce’s passion for form, in fact, is the secret of his progress as a novelist. He sought to bring the largest possible quantity of human life under the discipline of the observing mind, and the mark of his success is that he gave an epic form to what remains invisible to most novelists…. Joyce means many things to different people; for me his importance has always been primarily a moral one. He was, perhaps, the last man in Europe who wrote as if art were worth a human life…. By living for his art he may yet have given others a belief in art worth living for.’