Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man..., James Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man..., James Joyce
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A

Author: James Joyce

Narrator: Drew Dillon

Unabridged: 8 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/28/2019

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

The first novel by James Joyce, this semi-autobiographical narrative depicts the life of Stephen Dedalus, a character created as an allusion to Daedalus, a craftsman in Greek mythology. Beginning by depicting the early stages of Stephen's life, the language of the novel grows with the main character as he awakens sexually and rebels against religion. When he realizes that Ireland is restricting him, he commits to a self-imposed exile and travels elsewhere to grow as an artistbut not before declaring Ireland his homeland.

About James Joyce

James Joyce (1882–1941) was born in Dublin, Ireland. From the age of six, Joyce was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, at Clane, and then at Belvedere College in Dublin. Later he thanked the Jesuits for teaching him to think straight, although he rejected their religious instructions. In 1898 he entered the University College, Dublin, where he found his early inspirations from the works of Henrik Ibsen, St. Thomas Aquinas, and W. B. Yeats. Joyce's first publication, an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken, appeared in Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time he began writing lyric poems.

After graduation, Joyce spent a year in France, returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after her death, Joyce left Dublin with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid whom he later married, and traveled around Europe, eventually settling in Trieste, Italy. There Joyce wrote most of Dubliners, all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and large sections of Ulysses. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems entitled Chamber Music. In 1909, Joyce opened a cinema in Dublin, but this affair failed and he was soon back in Trieste, broke and working as a teacher, tweed salesman, journalist, and lecturer.

In 1916, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel, was published. At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zurich, where he started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France because of censorship troubles in Great Britain and the United States. In 1923, Joyce moved to Paris and started his second major work, Finnegans Wake, which occupied his time for the next sixteen years-the final version of the book was completed in late 1938.

After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zurich, where he died on January 13, 1941. Finnegans Wake was the last and most revolutionary work of the author.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nathan on July 07, 2007

Shut up James, you had me at 'moo-cow.'......more

Goodreads review by Vit on January 15, 2024

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book of ripening, a story of the complicated and excruciating spiritual struggle. A boy in the world of adults: he finds out that there is injustice, that there are such things as perfidy and hypocrisy… It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat......more

Goodreads review by Leonard on June 26, 2021

Portrait of the Artist (1916) reads like the story of a missed priestly vocation and the dawn of a literary calling. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was” — introducing Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego, to be reencountered in Ulysses. The novel follows Stephen through his learning y......more