A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The first novel by Irish writer James Joyce that traces the intellectual development of young Stephen Dedalus, the writer's alter-ego. Freeing himself from the faith, family and petty-bourgeois understanding, Dedalus experiences religious and intellectual awakening. Although it follows the tradition of the bildungsroman, tracing the personal development of the protagonist, this unique work of modernist fiction that fully introduces the technique of stream-of-consciousness. Creatively and sexually daring, this novel forged a new kind of fiction for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.