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Stephen Dedalus grows up in Catholic Ireland: a frightened small boy at boarding school, a Christmas dinner wrecked by a political quarrel, a teenager…
Stephen Dedalus grows up in Catholic Ireland: a frightened small boy at boarding school, a Christmas dinner wrecked by a political quarrel, a teenager terrified by a sermon on hell, a student who discovers that his true calling is not the priesthood but art. Joyce's language grows with him, from baby talk in the first pages to complex reflection at the end.
Context and significance
Published in 1916, the novel is based on Joyce's own youth and ends with Stephen deciding to leave Ireland and live by 'silence, exile and cunning'. It is the best way into Joyce before Ulysses, where Stephen appears again.
About the author
James Joyce (1882–1941) was born in Dublin, educated by the Jesuits, and left Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, never to live there again. They lived in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, where he taught English and struggled with poverty and failing eyesight, while writing almost entirely about the city he had left.
Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were followed by Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922 and banned for years in Britain and America, and by the even more experimental Finnegans Wake. He changed what a novel could be.