A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A,an autobiographical novel by J. Joyce , first published in the Egoist , 1914 – 15 .
It describes the development of Stephen Dedalus (who reappears in Ulysses in a slightly different incarnation) from his early boyhood, through bullying at school and an adolescent crisis of faith inspired partly by the famous ‘hellfire sermon’ preached by the Jesuit Father Arnall (ch. 3) and partly by the guilt of his own precocious sexual adventures, to student days and a gradual sense of his own destiny as poet, patriot, and unbeliever, who paradoxically must leave his own land in order to ‘encounter…the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’. Though not as innovative as the later work (its experimentation lies principally in its prose style changing as the novel progresses to mirror the growth and development of...
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