This second edition is revised and enlarged from Notes for Joyce: "Dubliners" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] established James Joyce as a leading figure in literary modernism across Europe. The novel is set in the author’s homeland, Ireland, and narrates, in five episodes, the childhood of Stephen Dedalus. The plot is entirely based on Joyce’s own life and serves as a private manifesto, particularly through its sharp declaration of independence from Catholicism. Joyce pioneered a new way of writing novels, abandoning traditional narration for stream of consciousness and introducing his epiphanies—momentary revelations that, in their everydayness, hint at a larger context of life. Upon the recommendation of the American poet Ezra Pound, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized in the magazine The Egoist in 1914/15 before being published as a book the following year. Today, more than a hundred years after its release, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is considered one of the most significant autobiographical texts in world literature. The Modern Library ranked it as the 3rd best English-language novel of the 20th century (with Joyce’s Ulysses as #1). JAMES JOYCE [1882-1941], Irish author, is a key figure in modernist literature with works such as Dubliners [1914], A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], and Ulysses [1922].

Joyce's semi-autobiographical chronicle of Stephen Dedalus' passage from university student to "independent" artist is at once a richly detailed, amusing, and moving coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique, and a profound examination of the Irish psyche and society.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. An artist's novel in a modernist style traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A Portrait began life in 1903 as Stephen Hero—a projected autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing consciousness. James 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, a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilized.

Discusses life, time, beauty, experience, meaning, music, and art.

A semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916. It tells the story of Stephen Dedalus's childhood and youth in Dublin; his quest for identity through art, and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself. It is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'.

Leading Joyce scholar argues that Joyce's work can only be fully understood in the context of his unbelief