A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism

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W.W. Norton, 2007 - Fiction - 490 pages
This Norton Critical Edition is based on Hans Gabler's acclaimed text and is accompanied by his introduction and textual notes. John Paul Riquelme provides detailed explanatory annotations.“Backgrounds and Contexts” is thematically organized to provide readers with a clear picture of the novel's historical, cultural, and literary inspirations. Topics include “Political Nationalism: Irish History, 1798-1916,” “The Irish Literary and Cultural Revival,” “Religion,” and “Aesthetic Backgrounds.”“Criticism” begins with John Paul Riquelme's helpful essay on the novel's structural form and follows with twelve diverse interpretations by, among others, Kenneth Burke, Umberto Eco, Hugh Kenner, Maud Ellmann, Joseph Valente, and Marian Eide.A Selected Bibliography is also included.

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About the author (2007)

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, into a large Catholic family. Joyce was a very good pupil, studying poetics, languages, and philosophy at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and the Royal University in Dublin. Joyce taught school in Dalkey, Ireland, before marrying in 1904. Joyce lived in Zurich and Triest, teaching languages at Berlitz schools, and then settled in Paris in 1920 where he figured prominently in the Parisian literary scene, as witnessed by Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Joyce's collection of fine short stories, Dubliners, was published in 1914, to critical acclaim. Joyce's major works include A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Stephen Hero. Ulysses, published in 1922, is considered one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century. The book simply chronicles one day in the fictional life of Leopold Bloom, but it introduces stream of consciousness as a literary method and broaches many subjects controversial to its day. As avant-garde as Ulysses was, Finnegans Wake is even more challenging to the reader as an important modernist work. Joyce died just two years after its publication, in 1941.

John Paul Riquelme is Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives and Harmony of Dissonances: T.S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination. He is editor of the two Bedford literary reprints--Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Dracula.

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