James Joyce’s “The Dead” is a short story that reflects on the effects of death on the living individual. Toward the end of the story, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta have just arrived home from a dinner gathering that Gabriel’s aunts had...

Sappho’s poetry in ‘If Not, Winter,’ is autobiographical firstly in the sense that anything anyone writes is autobiographical, as one’s narrative inclinations are very telling of that person’s focus and preoccupations; secondly in the sense that...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an uneasy place within the tradition of the bildungsroman. Critics contemporary to Joyce recognized the novel’s preoccupation with growth while acknowledging its dissimilarity to more conventional...

Joyce's depiction of women is characterized by a high degree of literary self-consciousness, perhaps even more so than in the rest of his work. The self-consciousness emerges as an awareness of both genre and linguistic expectations. contrasting...

...His mother said:

-O, Stephen will apologise.

Dante said:

-O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.

This capsule of utterance, which comes at the climax of the short first passage (or first independent "poem" of the book, as Fisher...

The Christmas dinner scenes divisive political and moral debate in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underlines an essential obstacle to the artistic mind of Stephen Dedalus. Ireland imposes a set of oppressive binariesnamely in the form of...

A caterpillar must crawl, inch by inch, across the earth before it can mature, grow wings, and soar beautifully above the land in which it was born. So too, in James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist as a Young Man, must the central character,...

In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Stephan Dedalus's evolving image of the female derives from his shifting and inconsistent perspective on religion and spirituality. Whichever religious belief he holds during each adolescent phase is...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, if nothing else, a record of the psychological journeys of Stephen Dedalus as he progresses from child to adult, unlearned rural boy to intellectual student, sinner to saint to artist. Stephen's level of...

Roy Disney explains that "It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." This is an important theme for the characters of Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of Frank McCourt from...

Ireland: for centuries, dreamers and tourists have associated it with rolling green hills, misty, cool fog, smiling, barefoot peasants, moss-covered castles built of stone, and haunting Celtic songs. This romantic picture may suit the foreigner,...

Imagination is the individual’s ability to create mental images through his perception of reality. It is an indispensable artistic tool that allows humans to express themselves creatively; it separates us from other living creatures. In A Portrait...

Joyce’s and Bennett’s writing have become synonymous with the arduous process of becoming an adult, and, despite the large gulf in time between their works’ publication, use some similar techniques to describe the process. However, Bennett’s ‘The...

In his 1987 study The Way of the World, literary scholar Franco Moretti states that the Bildungsroman “stands out as the most obvious of the (few) reference points available in that irregular expanse we call the “novel””. Indeed, while the reader...

Artists such as Lily Briscoe from To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and Stephen Dedalus from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are equally affected by the ways in which society interprets their art. They embody these two...

After witnessing the development of the young, unsophisticated Stephen Dedalus into the skeptical and scrupulous artist that concludes James Joyce’s antecedent novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his reappearance in Ulysses suggests that...

The word “epiphany”, literally meaning “showing forth”, is originally a Biblical term, referring to the festival commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, often called the “Magi”, usually celebrated on 6th January, or Twelfth...

The best style is that in which the form and the content, the manner and the matter are well-balanced and supportive of each other. The style of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was so novel that it drew the attention of readers and...

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a “Kunstlerroman”, and the story of a young artistic aspirant in a particular social setting. That is why the political background of the novel is so important, for it provides the environment for the...

The stream-of-consciousness novel is a twentieth-century innovation, which aims to depict the totality of experience through the human consciousness. This necessarily means a retreat from the direct portrayal of social interactions, and a...

The title of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” has been the subject of as much speculation as the novel itself, and like all modernist writing, this title has been able to maintain its open-ended nature. Indeed, this open-endedness has...

Religious symbols, narratives, and language play prominent roles in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In the Portrait, religious symbols and language permeate the consciousness of Stephen, such that...

Song had always been an aspect of life and literature. Dating back to the first epics of Homer, music has been understood as an important achievement. Since then, song has not only become a plot point in some stories, for example the tale of...

Icarus decided to fly too high. Stephen decided to sin. Icarus decided to fly too low. Stephen decided to pursue a more selfish path. Icarus fell. Stephen grew. Icarus’s story is a warning for any man with too much hubris. Stephen Dedalus, from...