A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

JOYCE, James.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1916.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York, 1916; London, 1917) is the first novel of James Joyce (1882-1941) and one of the foundational texts of literary modernism, a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman tracing the intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development of Stephen Dedalus from earliest childhood through his rejection of Irish Catholicism, nationalism, and family obligation and his determination to pursue his vocation as an artist in voluntary exile from everything that had formed him. Originally composed as the abandoned manuscript Stephen Hero beginning in 1904, the novel was radically reconceived and rewritten in the stream of consciousness technique that would define Joyce's mature style, serialized in Harriet Shaw Weaver's literary journal The Egoist from February 1914 to September 1915 before appearing in book form, with its American publication by B.W. Huebsch preceding the British Egoist Press edition. The epitome of the modernist Bildungsroman, the novel was controversial from the moment of its publication, with contemporary readers finding its treatment of the minutiae of daily life indecorous and its central character unappealing, while Ezra Pound accurately predicted that the book would remain a permanent part of English literature and H.G. Wells praised its originality and courage in the New Republic. It was chosen by Modern Library as one of 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century.