A Potrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Modern Classics)

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus' Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'. Both an insight into Joyce's life and childhood, and a unique work of modernist fiction, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to fully come into themselves. James Joyce (1882-1941), the eldest of ten children, was born in Dublin, but exiled himself to Paris at twenty as a rebellion against his upbringing. He only returned to Ireland briefly from the continent but Dublin was at heart of his greatest works, "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake". He lived in poverty until the last ten years of his life and was plagued by near blindness and the grief of his daughter's mental illness.