A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man_by #JAMES #JOYCE

#A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man_by #JAMES #JOYCE **#Introduction Published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man established its then thirty-two-year-old author, James Joyce, as a leading figure in the international movement known as literary modernism. The title describes the book's subject quite accurately. On one level, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be read as what the Germans call a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. ***#Key #Facts about A #Portrait of the #Artist as a #Young Man **Full Title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man **When Written: 1905 and 1914 **Where Written: Dublin and Trieste **When Published: 1916 **Literary Period: Modernism **Genre: Kunstlerroman, a narrative of an artist’s youth and maturation. **Setting: Dublin, Ireland, in the late 19th century. **Climax: Stephen looks ecstatically at a bird-like girl wading in the river, and feels clearly that he is destined to become a writer. **Antagonist: As Stephen moves from school to school, his antagonists vary. It can also be argued that the antagonists that remain constant are the humiliations of poverty and the aesthetic/philosophical restrictions of nationality and religion. **Point of View: Third-person limited omniscient ***#Historical #Context of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Portrait takes place during one of the most turbulent and eventful periods of Irish history. A significant issue during this period was Irish nationalism and separatism. Since the Norman invasion in the 12th century, large parts of Ireland had been held under British rule, and in 1801 Ireland became part of the United Kingdom. Throughout the 19th century, and especially after the great potato famines of the 1840s, many Irish people felt growing dissatisfaction with British rule and dreamed of becoming a sovereign nation. Irish separatists splintered into two major groups: Fenians, who favored the use of brute force, and constitutional reformists, who chose to follow a more moderate path within the confines of international law. Michael Davitt and Charles Parnell were famous separatist leaders of the 1870s and 80s. Under Parnell’s leadership, and with the support of the British prime minister, the Irish people hoped to finally establish home rule; but when it came out in 1891 that Parnell had been engaging in an extramarital affair with Kitty O’Shea, the wife of a member of the Irish Parliament, the Catholic Church denounced Parnell and he fell from power. He died only a year later, and the Irish separatist movement lost direction – until erupting in the 1919 War of Independence. ***#About the #NOVEL A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first published in serial form in the Egoist in the years 1914-15. Chronicling the life of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to young adulthood and his life-changing decision to leave Ireland, the novel is profoundly autobiographical. Like Stephen, Joyce had early experiences with prostitutes during his teenage years and struggled with questions of faith. Like Stephen, Joyce was the son of a religious mother and a financially inept father. Like Stephen, Joyce was the eldest of ten children and received his education at Jesuit schools. Like Stephen, Joyce left Ireland to pursue the life of a poet and writer. Joyce began working on the stories that formed the foundation of the novel as early as 1903, after the death of is mother. Previous to the publication of Portrait, Joyce had published several stories under the pseudonym "Stephen Dedalus." A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the earlier examples in English literature of a novel that makes extensive use of stream of consciousness. Stream of conscious is a narrative technique through which the author attempts to represent the fluid and eruptive nature of human thought. The narrative is anchored in the interior life of a character rather than from the perspective of an objective third-person narrator. While in Paris in 1902, Joyce discovered the French novel Les Lauriers sont Coup?s; Joyce credits this novel with the inspiration for creating his own style of stream of consciousness narrative. While Portrait lacks the ambition and scope of Joyce's later stream of conscious masterpiece, Ulysses, in many ways it was a revolutionary novel. The opening section is in stream of consciousness with a child protagonist, and the novel is marked by an increasing sophistication of narrative voice as the protagonist matures. Although many sections of the novel are narrated in a relatively direct style, Joyce writes long passages that sustain a complex and difficult language attempting to approximate the workings of human thought. Even when the work is narrated in a straightforward manner, the narrative voice never strays from the interior life of Stephen Dedalus. We see events only as they are filtered through Stephen. The book shows a wide range of narrative styles. There are lush and intricate passages, sections narrated in a direct style, and highly experimental sections. The close is very simply done, all in the form of Stephen's journal entries before leaving Ireland. The variety of styles is part of what makes Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man such an enjoyable read. Joyce is one of the central authors of the modernist canon, and he is best known for a core of four works: Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-5), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegan's Wake (1939). These last three works in particular had a huge impact on the development of modernist English literature. Writers as illustrious as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner were strongly influenced by Joyce's innovative narrative experiments.