A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialized in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915 and published in book form in 1916. A Portrait is a key example of the Knstlerroman (an artist's bildungsroman) in English literature. Joyce's novel traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions he has been brought up in. He finally leaves for Paris to pursue his calling as an artist. The work pioneers some of Joyce's modernist techniques that would later come to fruition in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The Modern Library ranked Portrait as the third greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century.[1] Portrait is a complete rewrite of his earlier attempt at the story, Stephen Hero. Large portions of Stephen Hero found their way, sometimes nearly unchanged, into Portrait, but the tone was changed considerably in order to focus more exclusively on the perspective of Stephen Dedalus. Literary Style Stylistically, the novel is written as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue, though towards the very end of the book dialogue-intensive scenes involving Dedalus and some of his friends, in which Dedalus posits his complex, Thomist aesthetic theory, and finally journal entries by Stephen, are introduced. Since the work covers Stephen's life from the time he was a child to his growing independence and ultimate abandoning of Ireland as a young man, the style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, with the complexity of language gradually increasing. Allusions in novel The book is set in Joyce's native Ireland, especially in Dublin. It deals with many Irish issues such as the quest for autonomy and the role of the Catholic church. A particular figure, who is also mentioned in Dubliners and Ulysses, and alluded to in Finnegans Wake, is the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell. The myth of Daedalus and Icarus features prominently in the novel. In Greek mythology, Daedalus is an architect and inventor who becomes trapped in a labyrinth of his own construction. Later, he finds himself on an island and fashions wings of feathers and wax for his son (Icarus) and for himself, so that they can escape. As they fly away Icarus grows bolder and flies higher, until, finally, he flies too close to the sun, which causes the wax to melt. Icarus plummets to the sea. This myth echoes the central themes of the novel - refusal to follow the path of the father, individual rebellion and discovery, producing a work of art that entraps the artificer, or allows him to escape his past. Stephen's name is an allusion to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Stephen Dedalus, like Saint Stephen, has conflicts with the established religion. The Divine Comedy is also echoed in the name Stephen gives his aunt - Dante. Dante is socalled because of the way 'The Auntie' sounds in her Cork accent. Ovid's Metamorphoses is referenced at the start with a quote saying, "Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes" Translation: "And he sets his mind to unknown arts" Allusions to novel The title has been adapted and parodied by many writers including Charles Perry in "Portrait of a Young Man Drowning", Dylan Thomas in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Joseph Heller in Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, Andrew Barlow and Kent Roberts' A Portrait of Yo Mama as a Young Man, Grayson Perry's biography Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl and William Eastlake's Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses. In Patrick White's novel The Solid Mandala, Waldo Brown plans but fails to write a novel called Tiresias a Youngish Man, thereby parodying both Joyce's novel and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.