Stephen Dedalus’s modernist journey in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914. The time period during which James Joyce wrote the novel is the same period that produced revolutionary developments in science and arts. This revolutionized knowledge became the ultimate foundation for modern arts. The art forms had begun to show a progressive inclination towards a certain preciosity in ways of exhibition, representation and innovations. In Literature, the novel writings showed new ways of rendering how people experienced the world around them. The novelists inward turned to the everyday complexities of human lives, the self-conscious perseverance, the attempted efforts to capture the chaotic order and in such collective ways, authentically established the modernist intelligence and ways of writing the ‘modernist novel’.