A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘an order in every way appropriate’

Abstract

A PORTRAIT of the Artist as a Young Man was a radical departure for Joyce. Although Dublin is again the principal setting and some of the concerns of Dubliners reappear here, the strategies and style of A Portrait are fundamentally different — and not simply because A Portrait is a novel as opposed to Dubliners as a collection of short stories. A Portrait is a masterly work on its own account, but it is also an important landmark both in terms of Joyce’s own development as a writer and the direction of the twentieth-century novel as a whole. Our analysis will consider all three aspects.