Abstract
This chapter reads Joyce’s generically and formally ambiguous narrative essay “A Portrait of the Artist” to show that the utopianism of its overall tendency and teleology—and of its hybrid form—marks it out as quintessentially early modernist. Attention to the piece within a wider argument about non-fiction allows us to consider the ways in which Joyce’s essay is actually a more radical, more modernist work than what we have of the novel that is closely related to it, Stephen Hero. Its form will be considered alongside examples of manifesto—another example of modernist non-fiction—to allow us to see the potential gains in classing this as a work in its own right, rather than as an avant-texte to another work. Indeed, the chapter shows that the goal the essay propounds—of liberation and emancipation in the widest sense—remains active and determining for Joyce’s entire oeuvre of writing.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Introductory (The Editors),” Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought, Volume 1, (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1904–05), p. 2. Digitized issues of Dana can be read on the Modernist Journals Project site: http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=1117807766801454&view=mjp_object.
- 2.
John Eglinton “The Beginnings of Joyce”, Life and Letters VII, December 1932, London, 400–401.
- 3.
Stanislaus Joyce, The Complete Dublin Diary, ed. George H. Healey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 11–13.
- 4.
It has to be added that the reference to May’s letter does not settle the issue. The letter does refer to Joyce reading out “each new chapter” to May and their mother, but Ed Mulhall, for instance, has argued that these may have been sketches or versions of the Epiphanies (L II, 382–3, Mulhall, www.rte.ie/centuryireland, 2). There is a definite contradiction between Stanislaus’s unequivocal statement that Joyce started what became Stephen Hero after the rejection of the “Portrait” essay and the testimony of May’s letter (Dublin Diary, 11–13). Stanislaus’s version makes for a neater story, but what we know of Stephen Hero, taken with May’s reference, strongly suggests that the more complicated narrative , indicating a “broken sequence” of transmission, is the more likely one (my thanks to Anne Fogarty for the felicitous “broken sequence” phrase).
- 5.
For recent work on modernism and utopia, see, for example, Nathan Waddell, Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2012); Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell, eds., Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2013); Stephen Eric Bronner, Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
- 6.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 202–204.
- 7.
W. B. Yeats , The Trembling of the Veil (London: T. Werner Laurie), 1922.
- 8.
Robert Scholes, and Richard M. Kain, eds., The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 1965), 56–74.
- 9.
Hugh Kenner , “The Portrait in Perspective” in Dublin’s Joyce (London: Faber, 1956), 109–33.
- 10.
Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York: Scribner’s 1931), 180.
- 11.
Mark A. Wollaeger , ed., James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Killeen, T. (2018). Tracing the Curve of an Emotion: Joyce’s Early “Portrait” Essay. In: Ebury, K., Fraser, J. (eds) Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72241-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72242-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)