A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
First published AD 1918, written in English
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the second book and first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. 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. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Your reading
Where it is set
What it draws on
- Metamorphoses
Ovid, AD 8*
Stephen's surname is Dedalus, after Ovid's maker of wings, and the novel's epigraph comes from Book 8 of the Metamorphoses: 'he turns his mind to unknown arts'. At the end Stephen, like Daedalus, is ready to fly.
