A Portrait of 20th Century Literature as a Young Form | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin...

Stephen Hero | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) | James Joyce

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	• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) James Joyce Penguin Classics, 2003 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 239 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Signet Classic!

If you're considering purchasing this book, or if it's being forced upon you and you are having a difficult time, or if you are like me and want to read and actually understand writers like Joyce, purchase the SIGNET CLASSIC edition of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." There is an absolutely fantastic introduction by Hugh Kenner that is, IMHO, indispensable. You can get all the SparkNotes and whatever else you want, but Kenner's intro is very concise, to the point, extremely clear and better than anything else I've ever seen as far as beginning to understand this classic.

Plus it's less than 5 bucks!

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A Portrait of 20th Century Literature as a Young Form

James Joyce is the single most important writer of the 20th century. Simply put, the form of the novel exists in two stages - pre-Joyce and post-Joyce; no other novelist approaches the impact on the literary landscape that Joyce acheived in perfecting his style. The story behind the actual writing of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (originally entitled Stephen Hero) is that Joyce began writing basically a semi-autobiographical account of his childhood up through his early adulthood. He then decided that he wanted to convey the events of his life in a form other than direct disclosure. The rest, as they say, is history. Enter stream of consciousness. Enter free association. Enter Freud, Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Bible, Catholicism, the complexity of man, the simplicity of man, social class,and Irish lifestyle (to name a tiny portion of what this novel presents) without ever having to mention many of these influences by name. What it really boils down to is that this novel began a revolution in the way literature is read and written. Sounds over the top I know, but think about it. What Joyce experimented with here he later advanced in Ulysses (which is even better than A Portrait) and totally submitted to in Finnegan's Wake (of which I didn't understand a single word). His direct influence ranges from Faulkner to Proust to Nabokov. For those who are just getting into literature and may not know those names, those three are heavy hitters. Like sumo-wrestler heavy.
The content of the novel itself reveals the inner character of Stephen Dedalus and, in turn, of James Joyce himself. As I said before, this novel is both largely biographical as well as psychological, perhaps more important in what it says about the human mind in general than what it says about the Irish mind of early 1900s Dublin. And frankly its just beatifully written. This is not Joyce's finest work (that would be Ulysses), but it is certainly one of the foundations upon which modern literature stands. And for that reason, even if you don't like Joyce's work (which is your loss to say the least) you have to respect it. To respect it is to at least read it. It's a tough style, but it's worth it. Trust me.

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Stephen Hero

Portrait of the artist is a vitally important novel for anyone interested in writing, writers, genius, repression, Catholicism, intellectualism versus dogmatism, the life and mind of James Joyce and novels as an art form. The writing style mutates and develops throughout the story, reflecting the different ages of Stephen Dedalus, from the baby talk and visceral imagery of his parents, governess Dante and Uncle Charles in his early childhood, through his schooldays as he wrestles with his intellect, his faith, his sexual awakening and his guilt to the advanced articulate and experimental style he invokes in his late adolescence, including an experimental journal at the end of the novel.

The themes in Portrait of the Artist cover the whole spectrum of growing up, but the principal drama surrounds the intellectual development of Stephen. He is a formidable mind, a free thinker. But his faith impells him throughout towards the narrow minded dogmatism of the Catholic Church. At times, the church holds the upper hand, as Stephen is terrified into confessing his sins with prostitutes in the face of Father Arnall's legendary, sensual, brutal 'Hellfire' sermon on the fate of sinners who don't repent before god. But Stephen wrestles with such demons, and grows, and fights, and ultimately prevails. He sees the image of the rotting cabbages in in the kitchen gardens and considers the disordered symbolism of this as more appealing to his natural essence than the neat tidiness of the shrine to Mary.

Stephen realises he must leave this claustrophobic restrictive life behind. The end of the novel chronicles his last days in Dublin before leaving Ireland. His conversation with Cranley forces home the realisation that Stephen is growing up, his childhood is behind him, and, most importantly, he is prepared to err and make mistakes, even if this means damnation. He is able, as he says 'To discover the mode of life or art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom'.

Stephen, with all his passionate intellectual talent, is ready to hit the world, and the forces such as Father Arnall who seem ready to stamp on such independence with vitriolic counter ideological pamphleteering cannot stop him. Thank God for that. The original title of the book, Stephen Hero, is apt indeed.

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Young genius takes flight

Portrait of the Artist is Joyce's Kunstleroman about the growth of sensibility in a young genius. The novel is luminous and because it is early Joyce, it's accessible as the writing style is straight ahead narrative modified to reflect the writer's age in various stages of his youth. It is easy to witness the writer's sensibility heighten as he matures: his sense of protest, his growing perspective of his life, church and nation. Proust and Joyce wrote at about the same time but met only once briefly in an awkward exchange and Joyce lived for years in self-imposed creative exile in Paris. In the later chapters there are stylistic similarities between early Joyce and Proust, whose style and narrative voice are consistent throughout the 4300 pages of La Recherche du Temps Perdu. However, Joyce's narrative technique changed radically as he grew as a novelist from Portrait to Ulysses and finally to Finnegan's Wake. In Joyce's willingness to experiment unfettered by style, voice, syntax, genre and diction he changed the English language: he left it better than he found it. Chapters 4 and 5 are brilliant and take flight like Daedalus, the inventive hawkman. If you seek an entry point into Joyce's work, this relatively simple, straightforward novel is your window. "To speak of these things and to try to undestand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand -- that is art." I can't encourage you more strongly to explore Joyce -- he was the most luminous genius who ever wrote a novel.

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Splendid First Novel from James Joyce

"A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man" is a fictionalized account of James Joyce's early life. But more importantly, it was a bold, radical departure from previous novels, since it possessed such a richly lyrical prose describing the artist's self reflection and maturation during his adolescence; perhaps it was the first important novel on self consciousness and realization published in the 20th Century. Its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus - whom we will encounter again in "Ulysses" - is none other than Joyce himself, striving to reconcile himself with the demands of his family, his faith and desire for artistic freedom. Ultimately it will be artistic freedom which wins out, as evidenced by the radical transformation of Joyce's initial, simplistic prose, to one which is truly poetic by the novel's conclusion. Set approximately around the time of the great Irish politician Parnell's death, Joyce offers fascinating insights into his early education, his relationship with the Catholic Church and his emerging sense of Irish nationalism, fueled by his admiration for Parnell. While this is not Joyce's best work of novel-length fiction, it certainly foreshadows his subsequent literary triumphs such as "Ulysses".

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