A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."

James Joyce's supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also, in the apt phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann, nothing less than "the gestation of a soul." For as he describes the shabby, cloying, and sometimes terrifying Dublin upbringing of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce immerses the reader in his emerging consciousness, employing language that ranges from baby talk to hellfire sermon to a triumphant artist's manifesto. The result is a novel of immense boldness, eloquence, and energy, a work that inaugurated a literary revolution and has become a model for the portrayal of the self in our time.

The text of this edition has been newly edited by Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and is followed by a new afterword, chronology, and bibliography by Richard Brown.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 04/06/1993
ISBN: 9780679739890
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.56lbs
Size: 8.02h x 5.25w x 0.71d
Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 70600 / Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Reading Level: 8.7 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 16