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Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin and at a Jesuit school, questioning the Catholic and Irish rules around him

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

by James Joyce

1916299 pagesDemanding readSteady pace
★ Modern Library 100 Best Novels (editors' list, 1998), No. 3

A young Irishman grows up and begins to question the Church and country that shaped him

Stephen Dedalus is a young Irish man whose youth the novel follows in Dublin and at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit school, around the 1890s. The book shows his growing questioning of the Catholic and Irish conventions he was raised under. It has five chapters, written mainly in the third person in free indirect style. Stephen is Joyce's fictional alter ego, and the book was reworked from Stephen Hero, an earlier autobiographical novel Joyce abandoned in 1907.

More about this book

Who

Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego.

World

Dublin and Clongowes Wood College around the 1890s.

What makes it different

Five chapters in free indirect style. It ran in the magazine The Egoist in 25 installments from 1914 to 1915, and B. W. Huebsch published it in New York on 29 December 1916.

Feel

Reflective and inward, at 299 pages.

See it on Amazon

Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition

Further reading

About the author

James Joyce3 books on Tori Books