A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
329 pages, Paperback
First published December 16,1916
This edition
- Format
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329 pages, Paperback
- Published
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March 25, 2003 by Penguin Classics
- ISBN
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9780142437346
- ASIN
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0142437344
- Language
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English
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Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyces literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an important character in Joyces Ulysses....
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Simon Dedalus
The father of Stephen, he is described as still grieving for his wife and is also portrayed as feckless in the upbringing of his children. This point is made when his daughters are described as feeling hungry and are evidently poor, whilst he is drinking ...
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Fr. John Conmee
Conmee was the rector of Clongowes Wood College when Joyce was a student there. He then became prefect of studies at Belvedere College. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen went to Conmee for support when he was unfairly punished by Father Do...
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Mary Dedalus
Mary Dedalus dies from cancer between the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the opening of Ulysses. Stephen returns home from Paris to see her. In her dying moments, she asks Stephen to pray over her and he refuses. As a result, Mary dies...
About the author
Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.
People note this novelist for his experimental use of language in these works. Technical innovations of Joyce in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels, drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and he created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.
John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.
Jesuits at Clongowes Wood college, Clane, and then Belvedere college in Dublin educated Joyce from the age of six years; he graduated in 1897. In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce published first an essay on When We Dead Awaken, play of Heinrich Ibsen, in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time, he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, as a teacher, and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, and when a telegram about his dying mother arrived, he returned. Not long after her death, Joyce traveled again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, whom he married in 1931.
Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber Music.
At the outset of the Great War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich, Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933.
In March 1923, Joyce in Paris started Finnegans Wake, his second major work; glaucoma caused chronic eye troubles that he suffered at the same time. Transatlantic review of Ford Madox Ford in April 1924 carried the first segment of the novel, called part of Work in Progress. He published the final version in 1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.
