Resources: Classic text revisited ... A Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man James Joyce, 1916

The book tracks Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, from childhood to maturity in turbulent turn-of-the-century Ireland, the prose style developing as the child grows into a young man. The background is Parnell and Irish nationalism and a militant Catholic education from the Christian Brothers; the foreground is the maturing young mind. As Stephen grows, he naturally falls under the influence of one or the other, but it is increasingly art - "the human disposition of matter towards an aesthetic end" - that claims his allegiance.

For many young people, religion and nationalism are forces that give meaning to their lives, but for Stephen as an artist they are nets flung to hold back the soul from flight and, like his mythical namesake, he is determined to fly over those nets. He feels he can better serve humanity through art, and the book ends with Stephen leaving Ireland for mainland Europe "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race". A bourgeois cop-out, or an act of freedom? The choice is yours.