A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first published in serial form in the Egoist in the years 1914-15. Chronicling the life of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to young adulthood and his life-changing decision to leave Ireland, the novel is profoundly autobiographical. Like Stephen, Joyce had early experiences with prostitutes during his teenage years and struggled with questions of faith. Like Stephen, Joyce was the son of a religious mother and a financially inept father. Like Stephen, Joyce was the eldest of ten children and received his education at Jesuit schools. Like Stephen, Joyce left Ireland to pursue the life of a poet and writer. Joyce began working on the stories that formed the foundation of the novel as early as 1903, after the death of is mother. Previous to the publication of Portrait, Joyce had published several stories under the pseudonym "Stephen Dedalus." A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the earlier examples in English literature of a novel that makes extensive use of stream of consciousness. Stream of conscious is a narrative technique through which the author attempts to represent the fluid and eruptive nature of human thought. The narrative is anchored in the interior life of a character rather than from the perspective of an objective third-person narrator. While in Paris in 1902, Joyce discovered the French novel Les Lauriers sont Coupés; Joyce credits this novel with the inspiration for creating his own style of stream of consciousness narrative. While Portrait lacks the ambition and scope of Joyce's later stream of conscious masterpiece, Ulysses, in many ways it was a revolutionary novel. The opening section is in stream of consciousness with a child protagonist, and the novel is marked by an increasing sophistication of narrative voice as the protagonist matures. Although many sections of the novel are narrated in a relatively direct style, Joyce writes long passages that sustain a complex and difficult language attempting to approximate the workings of human thought. Even when the work is narrated in a straightforward manner, the narrative voice never strays from the interior life of Stephen Dedalus. We see events only as they are filtered through Stephen. The book shows a wide range of narrative styles. There are lush and intricate passages, sections narrated in a direct style, and highly experimental sections. The close is very simply done, all in the form of Stephen's journal entries before leaving Ireland. The variety of styles is part of what makes Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man such an enjoyable read. Joyce is one of the central authors of the modernist canon, and he is best known for a core of four works: Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-5), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegan's Wake (1939). These last three works in particular had a huge impact on the development of modernist English literature. Writers as illustrious as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner were strongly influenced by Joyce's innovative narrative experiments.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man takes place in Ireland at the turn of the century. Young Stephen Dedalus comes from an Irish Catholic family; he is the oldest of ten children, and his father is financially inept. Throughout the novel, the Dedalus family makes a series of movies into increasing dilapidated homes as their fortunes dwindle. His mother is a devout Catholic. When Stephen is young, he and the other Dedalus children are tutored by the governess Dante, a fanatically Catholic woman. Their Uncle Charles also lives with the family. The book opens with stream of consciousness narrative filtered through a child's perspective; there is sensual imagery, and words approximating baby talk. We leap forward in time to see young Stephen beginning boarding school at Clongowes. He is very young, terribly homesick, un-athletic and socially awkward. He is an easy target for bullies, and one day he is pushed into a cesspool. He becomes ill from the filthy water, but he remembers what his father told him and doesn't tell on the boy. That Christmas, he eats at the adult table for the first time. A terrible argument erupts over politics, with John Casey and Stephen's father on one side and Dante on the other. Later that year, Stephen is unjustly hit by a prefect. He complains to the rector, winning the praises of his peers. Stephen is forced to withdraw from Clongowes because of his family's poverty. The family moves to Blackrock, where Stephen takes long walks with Uncle Charles and goes on imaginary adventures with boys from around the neighbourhood. When Stephen is a bit older, the family moves to Dublin, once again because of financial difficulties. He meets a girl named Emma Clere, who is to be the object of his adoration right up until the end of the book. His father, with a bit of charm, manages to get Stephen back into private school. He is to go to Belvedere College, another institution run by the Jesuits. Stephen comes into his own at Belvedere, a reluctant leader and a success at acting and essay writing. Despite his position of leadership, he often feels quite isolated. He continues to be a sensitive and imaginative young man, acting in school plays and winning essay contests. He is also increasingly obsessed with sex; his fantasies grow more and more lurid. Finally, one night he goes with a prostitute. It is his first sexual experience. Going with prostitutes becomes a habit. Stephen enters a period of spiritual confession. He considers his behavior sinful, but he feels oddly indifferent towards it. He cannot seem to stop going to prostitutes, nor does he want to stop. But during the annual spiritual retreat at Belvedere, he hears three fire sermons on the torments of hell. Stephen is terrified, and he repents of his old behavior. He becomes almost fanatically religious. After a time, this feeling passes. He becomes increasingly frustrated by Catholic doctrine. When a rector suggests that he consider becoming a priest, Stephen realizes that it is not the life for him. One day, while walking on the beach, he sees a beautiful girl. Her beauty hits him with the force of spiritual revelation, and he no longer feels ashamed of admiring the body. He will live life to the fullest. The next time we see Stephen, he is a student at university. University has provided valuable structure and new ideas to Stephen: in particular, he has had time to think about the works of Aquinas and Aristotle on the subject of beauty. Stephen has developed his own theory of aesthetics. He is increasingly preoccupied with beauty and art. Although he has no shortage of friends, he feels isolated. He has come to regard Ireland as a trap, and he realizes that he must escape the constraints of nation, family, and religion. He can only do that abroad. Stephen imagines his escape as something parallel to the flight of Dedalus, he escaped from his prison with wings crafted by his own genius. The book ends with Stephen leaving Ireland to pursue the life of a writer.

and tries to get Stephen to sign a petition.

Joyce is arguably the most influential modern writer. His influence on the fictional technique of twentieth-century writers, from traditional realists to the most wildly experimental postmodernists, has been decisive. Although Joyce's Ulysses has evoked a far greater amount of critical discussion, there is no doubt that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's most widely-read work. While Portrait is among the most frequently taught novels in modern university curricula, it is also a novel undergraduates often discover on their own. Despite its surface difficulties, young people still respond to the book's eerily convincing portrayal of a sensitive youth who is harrowed by religious and sexual guilt and transfigured by an idea of beauty. Stephen's remarkable self-involvement and his frustration under the authority of church, state, and parents rings especially true for undergraduate readers today, however different the specifics of circumstance.

So well established is Portrait as a modern classic that it is difficult to imagine the situation of the book's early reviewers, faced with writing of a sort they had not encountered before. Spotting literary greatness is an almost impossible task on its first appearance; Ezra Pound did it with Joyce, and so did T.S. Eliot, but even as perceptive a reader as Edward Garnett, who had encouraged Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and D.H. Lawrence, balked at Joyce. In a reader's report for the publisher Duckworth & Company, collected with many other early reviews in Robert Deming's two-volume James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, Garnett admits the book is "ably written" but needs revision because it is too "discursive, formless, unrestrained, and ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent." The novel is too "unconventional," Garnett asserts, and "unless the author will use restraint and proportion he will not gain readers" (81). Given this sort of misjudgment by a usually sensitive reader, it is all the more surprising that so many of the initial reviews of Portrait hailed it as a major achievement, even a work of "genius." Ezra Pound's review in The Egoist, where the book had appeared in installments, stressed that it was well written--and tried to suggest just how rare that was among novels in English. Indeed, "Joyce produces the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English." Aside from that, "I doubt if a comparison of Mr. Joyce to other English writers or Irish writers would help much to define him." Pound stresses Joyce's realism and the book's value as "diagnosis," but otherwise says virtually nothing about the novel's content (83). Others were more struck by what they saw as the book's unpleasantness. A review in Everyman entitled "A Study in Garbage" called it "an astonishingly powerful and extraordinary dirty study of the upbringing of a young man by Jesuits" and suggested that at the end of the book Stephen goes mad (85). Similarly, H. G. Wells in a rather awe-struck essay comparing Joyce to Swift, Sterne, and Conrad, nevertheless complained about Joyce's "cloacal obsession" (86-88). The Times protested the "occasional improprieties"; the Literary World complained of "the brutal probing of the depths of uncleanness" and the Manchester Guardian of the novel's "astounding bad manners" (89,92, 93).

Like other reviewers, the Guardian's essayist found in Stephen "a passion for foul-smelling things" (93), confusing Joyce's unusual technique of documenting odors and textures with his protagonist's tastes. Irish reviewers were, if anything, more offended than British ones. The Freeman's Journal claims that "Mr. Joyce plunges and drags his readers after him into the slime of foul sewers" (98). These critics' stress on Portrait's unpleasantness is likely to be somewhat baffling to a modern reader until we realize that the "impropriety" found on the book's "very first page" (89) can only be the reference to bed-wetting; at this point we understand what a large part of human existence in 1916 was held to be inappropriate for mention in literature. One theme not picked up in later criticism is the concern over whether Stephen and his companions are representative of Irish youth in their ideas. Wells noted that "every human being" in the book "accepts as a matter of course. . . that the English are to be hated," and adds that he thinks that picture is "only too true" (88). The Freeman's Journal on the other hand protested that "English critics, with a complacency that makes one despair of their intelligence, are already hailing the author as a typical Irishman, and his book as a faithful picture of Irish life." It would be just as accurate to see De Quincey's Opium-Eater as a typical picture of British youth, the reviewer asserts (99).

Still, Joyce's technique was so convincing that the reviewers had to admit that something beyond conventional realism was at work. A. Clutton-Brock said that "[Joyce] can make anything happen that he chooses" in his writing, and that "No living writer is better at conversations" (89). J.C. Squire agreed that the dialogue "is as close to the dialogue of life as anything I have ever come across" (101). Virtually all reviewers praised the writing, and some were swept away despite themselves, protesting all the while. The Manchester Guardian's writer begins, "When one recognizes genius in a book one can perhaps best leave criticism alone," and then goes on to give his reservations. Interestingly, he continues, "Not for its apparent formlessness should the book be condemned. A subtle sense of art has worked amidst the chaos, making this hither-and-thither record of a young mind and soul. . . a complete and ordered thing" (92). In noting this he is unusual, for nearly all the early reviewers complained of the book's formlessness, its abrupt transitions, its lack of plot, and its unusual demands upon the reader. Just as the term "naturalism" was used to evoke the "gutter-realism" of the notorious Emile Zola, the term "impressionism" occurred frequently to suggest an aesthetic combination of shapelessness and sensitivity in both protagonist and book.

But reaction to the novel did not develop in a vacuum, because within two years installments of Joyce's even more challenging Ulysses began to appear in The Little Review. In a now-famous essay entitled "Modern Novels" that appeared in 1919, Virginia Woolf hails Joyce as an example of a revolutionary sort of fiction that does away with outmoded conventions. "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness," she urges. In doing this--in shifting the focus inward, toward momentary perceptions and a "spiritual" dimension of consciousness--Woolf feels the artist will produce something closer to "life itself" (125-26). Gradually it began to be realized that a group of writers including Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and (somewhat later) Woolf herself were engaged in similar challenges to literary conventions, and that the art of such writers demanded evaluation on its own terms rather than censure for departing from the norms of Victorian prose and verse. This had two effects: first, published commentary on writers like Joyce tended to become either exclusively laudatory or exclusively derogatory, depending on which position the reviewer took in the politics of art. And further, as comments by Joyce's increasing circle of admirers appeared, those critics who took him seriously began devoting their energies to explicating his work rather than evaluating it.

The advent of Ulysses in 1922 helped draw the battle lines more clearly than Portrait had done. Stuart Gilbert's 1930 book James Joyce's "Ulysses", written with the help of Joyce, revealed to an uninformed public the complexity of Joyce's mythic structure in that book, as well as the richness and variety of his stylistic and narrative effects. One implication was that Portrait or even the earlier story collection Dubliners might well have formal complexities of their own that--as with Ulysses--had gone unnoticed. Gilbert also put some stress on Joyce's use of symbolism, a characteristic of his prose that his early reviewers, obsessed by his use of naturalistic detail, had slighted. This cut little ice with reviewers on the political left who, especially during the reign of "socialist realism" in the 1930's, dismissed Joyce as obscure, bourgeois, and apolitical. A Russian essay translated in New Masses (1933) sees the stream-of-consciousness method of Ulysses as "too closely connected with the ultra-subjectivism of the parasitic, rentier bourgeoisie, and entirely unadaptable to the art of one who is building socialist society." The naturalism of Portrait might at first seem more promising, since it exposes the material evils of capitalism, but it has its roots in "a morbid, defeatist delight in the ugly and repulsive" and in "an aesthetico-proprietary desire for the possession of 'things'" (591-92). As for the portions of Work in Progress that had so far appeared in journals, the Marxist reviewer (like mainstream reviewers throughout Europe and America) dismissed them as nonsense.

Meanwhile, another artistic trend was on Joyce's side. Increasingly during the twentieth century Anglophone writers became aware of the Continental literary tradition; indeed, in the 1920's both British and American writers migrated to Paris, often to sit at the feet of Joyce or Gertrude Stein, the great expatriates. Since Joyce's literary models were generally European rather than British or Irish, his work was more intelligible and less frighteningly original when seen in this context. Indeed, Ulysses was probably the first important work of English literature to be explicated and celebrated first by French critics. During the 1930's and 1940's a generation of American critics who were conversant with European literature naturally named Joyce among the great contemporary writers. Most notably, Edmund Wilson in his 1931 book Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 placed Joyce in the literary tradition of the French Symbolist poets of 1870-90.

The first serious study of Joyce's writing as a whole--apart from early biographical studies and the writing of Joyce's friends--was Harry Levin's pioneering James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1941). This remarkable book, much of it written when only portions of Finnegans Wake had appeared under the title Work in Progress, is still one of the better introductions to Joyce's work. Levin treats Portrait as autobiography and sees little irony in Joyce's treatment of Stephen. Levin presents Portrait as a late example of the Bildungsroman (or "novel of development," such as Stendhal's The Red and the Black or Flaubert's A Sentimental Education). He briefly discusses Stephen's aesthetic theory, and suggests that the progression from "lyric" to "epic" to "dramatic" forms characterizes Joyce's work as a whole. Levin presents Joyce as heir to the two apparently opposed late-nineteenth-century strains of naturalism and symbolism, and argues that in Joyce, as in Flaubert, the two "come to terms." In rather general terms he discusses the structural balance of the five chapters. Although most of his discussion in the book concerns Ulysses and the Wake, Levin does point out the dominant symbolic motif of flight and the role of the mythical Daedalus, the "fabulous artificer," in Portrait.

A number of other introductory works on Joyce were published during the forties, none of Levin's quality. One general study of the fifties that is still useful is Richard Kain and Marvin Magalaner's Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (1956). Kain and Magalaner survey the early reviews as well and the serious criticism available up to then, and intelligently discuss the problem of Joyce's biography, quoting from then-unpublished letters. Their discussion of Portrait is particularly interesting. They compare Portrait with its first-draft version, published as Stephen Hero (1955), stress the revision's condensation, abrupt transitions, and impressionist technique, and explore some of the references to obscure or popular works such as Bulwer-Lytton's play The Lady of Lyons or Dumas' The Count of Monte-Cristo. Most of their discussion centers on motifs such as apology, names, and blindness, and upon the idea of the epiphany and its function in the book. Magalaner and Kain also single out for discussion the single most influential essay on Portrait of the time, Hugh Kenner's "The Portrait in Perspective," first published in 1948 and revised in his book Dublin's Joyce.

Kenner's essay reads Portrait in the light of Ulysses and the Wake, and finds in the earlier book similar complexities of implication. Where "the two major works strive toward an inclusive mythopoeic vision embracing in an archetypal pattern of fall, struggle, and redemption every mode of human activity," Portrait does this only on the level of individual human action, suggesting "other possible levels of analogy" by implication. By pursuing these implications, Kenner shows how the book's first two pages "enact the entire action in microcosm." He pursues the "verbal leitmotif" linking whiteness, cold, and damp as a repellent complex and shows how words with their tricky meanings and associations illustrate stages in Stephen's development. Kenner argues that Stephen's "epiphanies" that arrest and embody artistic meaning in a single moment are not Joyce's method; instead, in each chapter of the book Joyce repeats the same pattern of showing Stephen embracing a dream in contempt of reality and then seeing the dream destroyed. "The movement of the book is dialectical; each chapter closes with a synthesis of triumph which in turn feeds the sausage-machine set up in the next chapter." Most important, Kenner argues that "Stephen's flight into adolescent 'freedom' is not meant to be the 'message' of the book." Stephen, Kenner argues, an "indigestibly Byronic" figure, is viewed ironically throughout. His rather Neoplatonic aesthetic is not Joyce's; his Romanticism is scorned by the more classically-minded Joyce; and instead of becoming the author of Portrait and Ulysses, Stephen will become a "parlor esthete," priggish, horrified by the sensual world, and egotistically self-involved.

Although Kenner qualified his argument in later books and articles, his essay set the terms for the arguments of other critics. The question is that of Joyce's ironic distance from his protagonist, and since the narrative voice itself changes greatly in the course of Portrait, this is not easy to determine. In his critical edition of Portrait (1968), Chester G. Anderson summarizes the debate and includes relevant essays by Wayne Booth and Robert Scholes. The Booth essay originally appeared in his The Rhetoric of Fiction, and contends that the degree of Joyce's irony--his "authorial distance"--cannot be established with any certainty because Joyce at times clearly admires Stephen and at times clearly satirizes him. As Booth points out, the problem is epitomized by Stephen's poem, the "Villanelle of the Temptress": it is unclear to many readers whether we are to take the poem as a success or as a failure. For Booth the problem is that Joyce was never certain of his own attitude toward his protagonist--although when Stephen appears in Ulysses with his wings clipped, it seems likely that we are to assume the boy was self-deluded in his more grandiose moments. The problem, according to Booth, is a flaw in Portrait itself. This argument is by no means settled, and echoes down to the present day in the debate over whether Stephen's misogyny is also Joyce's or is being ironically displayed by a Joyce sympathetic to feminism.

Meanwhile, many critics were less concerned with Joyce's moral stance toward his hero than with the internal complexities of his work. William York Tindall wrote three influential studies during the 1950's--James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (1950), A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (1959), and The Joyce Country (1960)--all of which mingled Tindall's flair for close, "New Critical" textual explication with his interest in literary symbolism and in Freud. In his Reader's Guide Tindall begins by asserting that Stephen may not be Joyce, but he is indeed the artist-hero-rebel. True to the formalist assumptions of the New Critics, Tindall looks at the four sections of chapters one, two, and five and the three sections of chapters three and four, and asserts that while he is unsure of the function of each part, "I am sure from what I know of Joyce that no part could be omitted or placed elsewhere without injuring the great design" (62). True to the New Critical valuation of irony, Tindall catalogues some of the ironic juxtapositions and echoes in the novel.

Like other formalists, Tindall is passionately interested in symbolism as well as structure, and so he spends a number of pages on the wings and labyrinth built by the mythical Daedalus (echoed by Stephen's imaginative "flights" and the maze of Dublin streets), not to mention the sexual contrivance he made for Queen Pasiphae and the "robot" Talus he fashioned to protect Crete (neither of which, unfortunately, Tindall finds present in Portrait). Tindall explores Stephen's less sweeping identifications with Jesus Christ (with Cranly playing John the Baptist, the "precursor"), Napoleon, Parnell, the Count of Monte Cristo, Dante, and St. Stephen (the first Christian martyr) before lingering awhile on Lucifer ("bearer of light"), who like Stephen declares "I will not serve" and like Prometheus brings mankind the forbidden fire of knowledge.

Less significant than symbols but also helping to unify the work, motifs greatly interest Tindall. He finds on the opening pages road, cow, water, woman, flower, and bird, all of which will recur meaningfully and musically (86). Other motifs, such as dogs, darkness and light, and the related blindness and sight, work similarly. Tindall "unpacks" a few of these images, showing how birds can be threatening (Heron, the eagles), images of escape (the birds above the library), or images of beauty (the wading "bird-girl" of Stephen's epiphany in chapter four). Birds also, of course, relate to the Daedalus myth. Similarly, the flower, a Neoplatonic symbol for the woman who exemplifies transcendent beauty and thus the poet's path to the divine world, is complicated by Stephen's invocation of an artificial "green rose." The green rose relates also to the red-green opposition throughout the book: green suggests the imagination, fertility, Ireland, while red suggests British authority, the Church, hellfire, and so forth.

Not all of these insights were unique to Tindall, of course, but aside from his own contributions he conveniently and wittily synthesized the work of many scholars for a generation of readers. Among other studies exploring aspects of the book on which Tindall touches, Chester Anderson's "The Sacrificial Butter" discusses specifically images that Joyce draws from Roman Catholic iconography, while David Hayman's "Daedalian Imagery in A Portrait" (1964) further explores Joyce's use of that myth and Bernard Benstock's "A Light From Some Other World" shows how many image patterns contribute to the book's meaning. Studies of the novel's structure include Lee T. Lemon's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Motif as Motivation and Structure" (1966), an analysis inspired by the Russian Formalists, and Sidney Feshbach's "A Slow and Dark Birth: A Study of the Organization of A Portrait" (1967), which is more psychological in orientation. Other essays representative of work done in the 1950's and 1960's can be found in collections of essays on Portrait edited by Thomas Connolly (1962), William Morris and Clifford Nault (1962), Chester Anderson (1968), and William Schutte (1968).

But New Critical studies of the book as a self-contained structure unified by symbols and motifs were not the only work done during this period--or even, in some respects, the most important work. The natural course of Joyce criticism was altered forever by the publication of Richard Ellmann's magisterial biography James Joyce in 1959. Trained as a New Critic, Ellmann nonetheless "read" Joyce's life as if it were a literary text. Given a writer whose life and work were as intimately intertwined as they were in the case of Joyce, this proved to be extremely convincing, especially as Ellmann skillfully interwove literary interpretation with biography throughout. Stuart Gilbert had edited a collection of Joyce's letters in 1957; in 1966 Ellmann reedited that volume and produced two additional volumes. The sheer mass of information about Joyce, some of it quite intimate, was enough to make some critics forget the dangers of the "biographical fallacy." Meanwhile, Robert Scholes and Richard Kain's The Workshop of Daedalus (1965) made available Joyce's unpublished "epiphanies" along with various working notebooks and manuscript fragments and a considerable amount of biographical information, all of which spurred interest in Joyce's composition process and his artistic development generally. For instance, the most influential essay treating Joyce's actual composition process in writing Portrait is Hans Walter Gabler's "The Seven Lost Years of A Portrait."

The 1970's saw the impact in American and British criticism of a variety of Continental critical approaches, most of which had been strenuously resisted during the previous decades. The so-called "phenomenological" criticism of the Geneva School, whose best American practitioner was the early J. Hillis Miller, was reflected in Suzette Henke's Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook (1978), which deals with Ulysses, and by R. B. Kershner's "Time and Language in Joyce's Portrait" (1976), a study of the interiority of Stephen's time-sense and the ways in which subjectivity and objectivity are unified in his experience. The Exile of James Joyce (1972) by Helene Cixous--who later would be best known as a major "French feminist"--combines a psychological approach to Joyce's whole work with themes such as absence and silence or art as transgression that were of particular interest to structuralists and post-structuralists.

A renewed interest in Marxist criticism, especially as adapted by the "Frankfurt School" (and in socially- and politically-based criticism in general) led to a new critical distance from the society of which both Stephen and Joyce were a part; issues like Joyce's sexual tastes now seemed less important in themselves and more significant as markers of social development at a given historical moment. James Naremore's "Consciousness and Society in A Portrait" (1976) discusses "some of the ways that Stephen Dedalus's ideas, language, and art have been affected by his economic status and his Catholic upbringing," and also reveals Joyce's fictional technique as a variety of realism that betrays the author's defensive reaction against his own "excremental vision." The Godlike impersonality that Stephen claimed for the artist, and that New Critics claimed for Joyce, was wearing thin. While Naremore had asserted that Joyce was a more politically-aware writer than most earlier critics had thought, Richard Ellmann's The Consciousness of Joyce (1977) provided evidence for the writer's interest in politics from Joyce's own library. Joyce had early termed himself a socialist and had referred to the change in the relationship between men and women as the most important social change of his time; Ellmann demonstrated that Joyce's political awareness was not simply a fashion of his youth. Dominic Manganiello's full-scale study Joyce's Politics (1980) broadened the argument, presenting Joyce as--unlike other major modernists such as Yeats, Eliot or Pound--a social progressive.

During the 1970's and 1980's a host of varieties of historically-responsive criticism evolved, and with them a broad spectrum of interests that might once have seemed peripheral to Joyce's art. Richard Brown's James Joyce and Sexuality (1985) showed how the sexual rebelliousness, oddity, or experimentation of Joyce's characters occurred within a political context in which, for instance, assenting to a conventional marriage could be seen as ceding control of one's sexuality to the state. Cheryl Herr's groundbreaking study Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (1986) set Joyce's work within the context of the popular press, the popular theater, and the tradition of popular religious oratory, arguing that Joyce's use of these materials produced a powerful social critique. Three years later, R. B Kershner's Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature, which treated Joyce's early writing, made a similar argument from an analysis of Joyce's sources in popular writing of the late nineteenth century, and included an extended discussion of Portrait.

Meanwhile, structuralism, deconstruction, and post-structuralism began to have a major impact on Joyce studies. Relatively few of the Continental critics and their followers addressed Portrait directly though, preferring to use Ulysses and especially the Wake to exemplify the ways in which language itself formed complex structures independent of signification or (alternately) undermined itself. Starting in the 1970's essays on Joyce by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida began appearing in Joyce conference volumes, and books and articles devoted to Joyce took on a new theoretical rigor. Following Barthes's announcement of the "death of the author" in modern literature, the new work paid increased attention to style and structure in Joyce's work--and especially to the linguistic and philosophical implications of these--and once again shunned the biographical. Derrida's critique of structuralism in many ways exaggerated these tendencies.

The book that best exemplifies these trends, and applies them to Portrait as well, is Colin MacCabe's post-structuralist James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1979). Summary is difficult for a book such as this, especially as MacCabe refuses to "interpret" Joyce in any conventional sense: "Instead of constructing a meaning, Joyce's texts concern themselves with the position of the subject in language" (4). While MacCabe also refuses to "psychologize" Joyce in any ordinary way, he does rely heavily on the work of Jacques Lacan, a revisionist Freudian who redirected attention to language as the primary material of the psychoanalytic method. Further, MacCabe insists that his reading of Joyce is radically political, because Joyce's revolutionary politics are inherent in his language and its new relationship to representation, rather than residing in any particular statements in his texts.

MacCabe sees in the movement from Stephen Hero to Portrait a change from the ordered world of the "classic realist text", in which meaning is guaranteed by a "Father" and resolution is implied by the very narrative, to a new world in which all meanings are provisory, in which third and first person blend, and in which sound carries more weight than sense. Although the language of the artist threatens to establish a "meta-language" that will enable us to evaluate the other languages represented in the book, even this possibility is frustrated by the book's discontinuities. The technical problems that for critics like Booth had marked flaws in Portrait are precisely those MacCabe celebrates as liberating us from the epistemology of bourgeois humanism.

The general trend of criticism in the past two decades has been away from the New Critical presumption of organic unity in Joyce's works, away from symbolic interpretation, and in some ways away from biography. The stress has been upon close analysis of style, a reexamination of the social and political context of Joyce's work, an intense theoretical examination of the implications of Joyce's writing project, and a questioning of previous interpretations of the entire modernist movement. An excellent recent article that exemplifies at least some of these points is Michael Levenson's "Stephen's Diary in Joyce's Portrait--the Shape of Life" (1985). Important works on Ulysses and, especially, Finnegans Wake have appeared under the stimulus of Continental approaches, and the fact that both Derrida and Lacan championed Joyce has encouraged a great deal of work in deconstructive and other poststructuralist modes. The collection of politically-oriented contemporary critical approaches loosely grouped together as "cultural critique" and the allied approach known as "New Historicism" have both had an impact. The most important intellectual event of the past twenty years, the rise of feminist criticism, has been reflected in a wide variety of feminist approaches to Joyce as well.