A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners

Widely regarded as a great stylist of 20th-century English literature, Joyce deserves the term ‘revolutionary’. His literary experiments in form & structure, language & content, signaled the modernist movement & continue to influence writers today. His two earliest, most accessible, successes–A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man & Dubliners–are here brought together in one volume. Both reflect his lifelong love-hate relationship with Dublin & the Irish culture that formed him.
In the semi-autobiographical Portrait, young Stephen Dedalus yearns to be an artist, but 1st must struggle against the forces of church, school & society, which fetter his imagination & stifle his soul. The book’s inventive style is apparent from its opening pages, a record of an infant’s impressions of the world around him–one of the 1st examples of the stream of consciousness technique.
Comprising 15 stories, Dubliners presents a community of mesmerizing, humorous & haunting characters–a group portrait. The interactions among them form one long meditation on the human condition, culminating with ‘The Dead’, one of Joyce’s most graceful compositions centering around a character’s epiphany. A carefully woven tapestry of Dublin life at the turn of the last century, Dubliners realizes Joyce’s ambition to give his countrymen ‘one good look at themselves.’