A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The next book I'm reading is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I am excited about his one because James Joyce is from Ireland, just like my family on my fathers side is. He is writing in a time when my grandfather James was alive so I'm hoping to get a bit of insight into what growing up was like for him. This is the first book I had to purchase and luckily found it straight away at the used book store. I'm hoping to get all of these books second hand, not only to keep costs down but I love the feel of an old book.

So here's the summary!

Set in Ireland in the late nineteenth century, Portrait is a semi-autobiographical novel about the education of a young Irishman, Stephen Dedalus, whose background has much in common with Joyce’s. Stephen’s education includes not only his formal schooling but also his moral, emotional, and intellectual development as he observes and reacts to the world around him. At the center of the story is Stephen’s rejection of his Roman Catholic upbringing and his growing confidence as a writer. But the book’s significance does not lie only in its portrayal of a sensitive and complex young man or in its use of autobiographical detail. More than this, Portrait is Joyce’s deliberate attempt to create a new kind of novel that does not rely on conventional narrative techniques.

Rather than telling a story with a coherent plot and a traditional beginning, middle, and end, Joyce presents selected decisive moments in the life of his hero without the kind of transitional material that marked most novels written up to that time. The “portrait” of the title is actually a series of portraits, each showing Stephen at a different stage of development. And, although this story is told in a third-person narrative, it is filtered through Stephen’s consciousness. Finally, the book can be read as Joyce’s artistic manifesto and a declaration of independence—independence from what Joyce considered the restrictive social background of Catholic Ireland and from the conventions that had previously governed the novel as a literary genre. More than eighty years after its publication, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man continues to be regarded as a central text of early twentiethcentury modernism.

I'm armed with my glossary of Irish words and Latin phrases and am ready to rock. So excited about this one as it was on all three of the lists that I combined. Must be good if so many people think highly of it!