A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

This novel by the literary genius that is James Joyce has recieved very mixed feelings from both critics in the real world and on Dooyoo! I feel a resposibility to give you my own insight into this 'classic' having studied it in depth, since one of the most widely acclaimed problems readers have with this novel is its difficulty to interpret. If you want a real book review read on if you dare, because this is going to get quite intense. Modernists such as Eliot, Woolf and Joyce challenged the conventions of 19th Century Edwardian High Realism. Instead of following convention they wanted to record the way in which the mind operates, how we truly ...  Read the complete review

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Now largely of interest as a way of understanding the mind and the developing writing style of James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a largely autobiographical novel tracing the author’s youth from his birth to his departure from Ireland. It was published in The Egoist 1914 - 1915 in serial form but its first draft, Stephen Hero, was also published later in 1944. The central character is Stephen Dedalus (who also appears in Ulysses) and he narrates his own life in words and styles appropriate to each phase: as such the earliest stages are expresses in simplistic and fragmentary diction, ...  Read the complete review