A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus grows up in a Dublin of Jesuit schools, nationalist argument, and family decline, moving from pious child to self-styled exile. Joyce charts the transformation through language itself: the baby-talk of the opening gives way to adolescent rhetoric, then to the colder prose of a young man deciding what he owes to country, church, and family, and what he refuses to owe.Signet Classics edition includes Hugh Kenner's introduction, useful for readers who want to know what they are getting into. The novel is the great farewell to nineteenth-century realism disguised as a bildungsroman. It suits the reader who suspects that growing up means learning which nets to fly by and which to cut, and who is willing to read a novel that begins in baby talk and ends in exile.
