A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes

by James Joyce, Chester G. Anderson (Editor)

Overview

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin childhood and youth, providing an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140155037
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/30/1977
Series:	The Viking Critical Library
Edition description:	Viking Critical Library Edition
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	584,378
Product dimensions:	5.14(w) x 7.74(h) x 1.23(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, the oldest of ten children. Though the family was poor, he was educated at the best Jesuit schools and then at University College, Dublin. Following his graduation in 1902, Joyce went to Paris, where he devoted himself to writing poems and prose sketches until he was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 due to the fatal illness of his mother. There he met a young woman from Galway, Nora Barnacle, and persuaded her to go with him to the Continent, where he planned to teach English, and in 1905 they moved to Trieste. They had two children, a son and a daughter. His first book, the poems of Chamber Music, was published in London in 1907. When Italy entered the First World War, Joyce moved to Zurich, where he remained until 1919. During this period he published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Exiles, a play (1918). Soon after the armistice, Joyce moved to Paris to arrange for the publication of Ulysses, a book which he had been working on since 1914. It was published on his birthday, in 1922, and brought him international fame. The same year he began work on Finnegans Wake, and though much harassed by eye troubles, and deeply affected by his daughter’s mental illness, he completed and published that book in 1939. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he went to live in Unoccupied France, then managed to secure permission in December 1940 to return to Zurich. Joyce died there six weeks later, on January 13, 1941, and was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery.
 
Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, typographer, and web designer. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club board of directors, has been named a Forbes Magazine "30 under 30" in art and design as well as an ADC Young Gun and one of Print Magazine’s "New Visual Artists". She has designed for Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, Tiffany & Co, Penguin Books and many others. She resides primarily in San Francisco, occasionally in Brooklyn.

 

Date of Birth:

February 2, 1882

Date of Death:

January 13, 1941

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Place of Death:

Zurich, Switzerland

Education:

B.A., University College, Dublin, 1902

Website:

http://www.jamesjoyce.ie

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
by .
Copyright © 1977 James Joyce.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManEditor's Preface
I. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Text
A Note on the Text

Related Texts by Joyce
Editorial Note
A Portrait of the Artist
Epiphanies
From Stephen Hero: Emma Cleary; I Will Not Submit; The Convent Girls; You Are Mad, Stephen; Epiphanies
The Trieste Notebook
From Ulysses: Let Me Be and Let Me Live; The Only True Thing in Life?; Nothung!
From Finnegans Wake: Shem the Penman; The Haunted Inkbottle

III. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Criticism
Early Comment:
Ezra Pound, Letter to Joyce
Edward Garnett, Reader's Report
Ezra Pound, James Joyce: At Last the Novel Appears
Diego Angeli, Extracts from Il Marzocco
H. G. Wells, James Joyce
The Egoist, Extracts from Press Notices
The Egoist, James Joyce and His Critics: Some Classified Comments

The Tradition and the New Novel:
Maurice Beebe, The Artist as Hero
Irene Hendry Chayes, Joyce's Epiphanies
Frank O'Connor, Joyce and Dissociated Metaphor
William York Tindall, The Literary Symbol

General Readings:
Richard Ellmann, The Growth of Imagination
Harry Levin, The Artist
Hugh Kenner, The Portrait in Perspective
Kenneth Burke, Definitions

Controversy: The Question of Esthetic Distance:
Editor's Introduction
Wayne Booth, The Problem of Distance in A Portrait of the Artist
Robert Scholes, Stephen Dedlaus, Poet or Esthete?

IV. Explanatory Notes
Chronology
Topics for Discussion and Papers
Selected Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Frank O'Connor

The first page, which looks like a long passage of baby talk, is an elaborate construct that relates the development of the senses to the development of the arts.

Alfred Kazin

Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics. He showed that the material of fiction could rest upon as tense a distribution and as delicate a balance of its parts as any poem. Joyce's passion for form, in fact, is the secret of his progress as a novelist. He sought to bring the largest possible quantity of human life under the discipline of the observing mind, and the mark of his success is that he gave an epic form to what remains invisible to most novelists...Joyce means many things to different people; for me his importance has always been primarily a moral one. He was perhaps, the last man in Europe who wrote as if art were worth a human life... By living for his art he may yet have given others a belief in art worth living for

Editorial Reviews

Joyce’s work is not about the thing—it is the thing itself.”—Samuel Beckett

“Admirable.”—Jorge Luis Borges

From the Publisher