A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

&quot;I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence exile and cunning.&quot;<br><br>James Joyce's supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also in the apt phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann nothing less than &quot;the gestation of a soul.&quot; For as he describes the shabby cloying and sometimes terrifying Dublin upbringing of his alter ego Stephen Dedalus Joyce immerses the reader in his emerging consciousness employing language that ranges from baby talk to hellfire sermon to a triumphant artist's manifesto. The result is a novel of immense boldness eloquence and energy a work that inaugurated a literary revolution and has become a model for the portrayal of the self in our time.<br><br>The text of this edition has been newly edited by Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and is followed by a new afterword chronology and bibliography by Richard Brown.