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A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man SHORT CONTEXT
A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man SHORT CONTEXT
JAMES JOYCE
A - James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in the town of Rathgar, near Dublin,
Ireland.
Published in serial form in 19141915, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man draws on
many details from Joyce's early life. The novel's protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, is in many
ways Joyce's fictional double. Like Joyce himself, Stephen is the son of an impoverished
father and a highly devout Catholic mother. Also like Joyce, he attends Clongowes Wood,
Belvedere, and University Colleges, struggling with questions of faith and nationality before
leaving Ireland to make his own way as an artist. Many of the scenes in the novel are
fictional, but some of its most powerful moments are autobiographical. It is a
bildungsroman, a descript6ion of the authors life, a biography in the person of Stephen
DedalusJ oyce became increasingly committed to language and literature as a champion of
Modernism producing the most interesting and personalized literary techniques. The novel
depicts the formative years in the life of Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce and
a pointed allusion to the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology, Daedalus.
In addition to drawing heavily on Joyce's personal life, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man also makes a number of references to the politics and religion of early-twentieth-
century Ireland. When Joyce was growing up, Ireland had been under British rule since the
sixteenth century, and tensions between Ireland and Britain had been especially high since
the potato blight of 1845. In addition to political strife, there was considerable religious
tension: the majority of Irish, including the Joyces, were Catholics, and strongly favored
Irish independence. The Protestant minority, on the other hand, mostly wished to remain
united with Britain. . In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen's friends
at University College frequently confront him with political questions about this struggle
between Ireland and England. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of
Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, as he
gradually decides to cast off all his social, familial, and religious constraints to live a life
devoted to the art of writing. As a young boy, Stephen's Catholic faith and Irish nationality
heavily influence him. He attends a strict religious boarding school called Clongowes Wood
College. At first, Stephen is lonely and homesick at the school, but as time passes he finds
his place among the other boys. After completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in
Zurich in 1915, Joyce returned to Paris, where he wrote two more major novels, Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake, over the course of the next several years. These three novels, along
with a short story collection, Dubliners, form the core of his remarkable literary career.
Today, Joyce is celebrated as one of the great literary pioneers of the twentieth century.