James Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in serial form between 1914 and 1915. The novel follows Stephen Dedalus from early childhood through his student years in Dublin, tracing the development of his aesthetic sensibility and his progressive detachment from the institutions, family, Church, nation, that shaped him. The opening pages, narrated in the vocabulary of a very young child, gradually shift register as Stephen ages, so that the style of the prose itself enacts the development it describes. By the final section, Stephen is keeping a diary and theorizing about art in the language of Aquinas adapted for aesthetic rather than theological purposes.
The hellfire sermon in Chapter Three, delivered at a school retreat, convincing Stephen temporarily of his damnation, is one of the most technically accomplished pieces of extended rhetoric in English fiction. Joyce reproduces the structure of a Jesuit sermon with documentary precision, making it entirely credible on its own terms while simultaneously allowing the reader to observe Stephen's response to it from outside. The chapter that follows, where Stephen confesses and temporarily embraces Catholicism with his characteristic totality of commitment, is structured as a counter-sermon: the same intensity directed toward redemption rather than terror. Both are finally understood by Stephen as performances, not insincere, but shaped by external forms that he eventually recognizes he did not choose.
The novel's claim on contemporary readers lies in its portrait of the process by which a person separates from the systems of belief and belonging they were raised in, a process Joyce renders without celebrating or condemning. Stephen's famous declaration that he will not serve is not triumphant; it is the announcement of an isolation he has already partly inhabited for years and whose costs the diary entries at the end begin to register. The novel is the most accessible of Joyce's major works and serves as the best preparation for the deliberate difficulties of Ulysses, which takes Stephen's aesthetics and applies them to a much larger canvas.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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