What is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man About and Why Should I Care?īrothers and sisters in Shmoop, let us take a moment to bow our heads in appreciation of some of the fine things that draw upon the glorious wellspring of innovation that is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In short – great book then, great book now. Joyce treats youth with a directness and honesty that’s pretty remarkable. Its challenging attitude to family, homeland, and the Catholic Church all gave the novel (and Joyce himself) quite the reputation when it was published. Portrait of the Artist is Joyce’s reworking of the classic coming of age story (the fancy German term is bildungsroman), and it mirrors the author’s life up to age 20, when he left Dublin for Paris. This book is definitely much loved and studied in its own right, however. The novel also introduces us to Stephen Dedalus, who would later be featured prominently in Ulysses.

Notably, the novel starts to make use of techniques that would make Joyce famous – and infamous – with Ulysses, such as stream of consciousness narration, interiority (a revealing view of the character’s inner workings), and a frank realism that shocked some readers of the time. Portrait of the Artist really unleashed the massive power of Joyce’s innovation and unconventionality upon the literary world. This novel, the first in Joyce’s whopping hat-trick of great novels, is both shorter and more approachable than either of Joyce’s later masterpieces (for which we humbly thank him). But before these two massively important and, let’s face it, incredibly difficult texts came into being, Joyce published his first major work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in 1916. Joyce is lauded for his total re-envisioning of the novel – and of the world in general. Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939) are two of the most significant novels of the twentieth century, and if you talk to some grad students, they might argue quite convincingly that Ulysses is more important to our modern world than the Bible. James Joyce certainly wrote some Very Important Books. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Introduction

A portrait of a young artist