A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was written across some ten years, during which Joyce struggled to remake the novel into something revolutionary and new, abandoning the heavily autobiographical Stephen Hero with its ‘traditional’ narrative style, and recasting it in the modernist narrative of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with its thematically-related episodes centred on the awareness of its central character Stephen Dedalus.
The course will look at the background and evolution of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, from Joyce’s 1904 essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, through Stephen Hero, to his first complete novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, itself a giant step towards the definitive modernist novel, Ulysses. The chronology of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man spans from around the time of the death of the great Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, to the year of Joyce’s own departure for Paris, 1902. The conflicts which the growing Stephen encounters are cast in relation to the politics of Irish nationalism, sexuality and the Church, and the literary revival.
Our study of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will be informed by historical and biographical contexts, and augmented by consideration of Joyce’s other work during this period, his poetry, his short prose work Giacomo Joyce (1914), and his play Exiles (written 1913-1915). Stephen’s growth into rebellion in his novel proclaims Joyce’s defiant credo: ‘I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself […] as freely as I can and as wholly as I can’.
Learning outcomes
- An understanding of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man within the historical, cultural, literary, and political contexts of its time;
- An understanding of the place of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man both within Joyce’s life and within the writing of the period;
- An understanding and recognition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man alongside the other texts considered, strategically as a core and necessary part of Joyce’s wider literary vision.
