He returned to Ireland at his family's request as his mother was dying of cancer. He moved to Paris to study medicine, but soon gave it up. The publication of A Portrait and the short story collection Dubliners (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism.īorn into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland, James Joyce (1882–1941) excelled as a student, graduating from University College, Dublin, in 1902. American modernist poet Ezra Pound had the novel serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 19, and published as a book in 1916 by B.

After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing consciousness. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).Ī Portrait began life in 1904 as Stephen Hero-a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style.

Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. A Künstlerroman written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce.

James joyce portrait of the artist