Stephen Hero - A Part of the First Draft of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce, James

Résumé :
This antiquarian book contains Stephen Hero, a part of the first draft of James Joyce's seminal book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This manuscript was offered for sale in 1935 by the first publisher of Ulysses; Miss Sylvia Beach, in her Parisian bookshop 'Shakespeare and Company'. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a famous autobiographical novel written by Joyce and published posthumously. It traces the intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, the fictional alter ego of Joyce about whom H. G. Wells once wrote: one believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.'' Many antiquarian books such as this are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Biographie:
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 - 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism. Joyce was born in 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, into a middle-class family. A brilliant student, he briefly attended the Christian Brothers-run O'Connell School before excelling at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's alcoholism and unpredictable finances. He went on to attend University College Dublin. In 1904, in his early twenties, Joyce emigrated to continental Europe with his partner (and later wife) Nora Barnacle. They lived in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich. Although most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses, he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.