A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A Künstlerroman (a narrative about an artist’s growth to maturity) in a modernist style, it 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 Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began life in 1903 as Stephen Hero, a projected sixty-three-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After twenty-five 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 allowing the reader to peer into Stephen’s developing consciousness. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialized in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914-1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.
In 1998 the Modern Library named the novel third on its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century.
A collegue of mine gave me this book as christmas gift. I want to read it as soon as possible.
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