Filed in archive Literature on June 18, 2010

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Irish novelist James Joyce's novels are an intricate comment on the artistic twist associated with the term "aestheticism". Joyce's aesthetic notion that may well be paralleled with the dictum, "art for art's sake" is well developed in his novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" regarded as one of the greatest fiction books. The novel traces the evolution of the artist- Stephen Dedalus , as a young boy to that of an artist - with all his aspirations, longings, frustrations with the daily course of life and its monotony but finally seizes over all barriers of mediocrity. The book reviews the spiritual abyss in which Stephen plunges into which are depicted as some sinful activities in which he takes part which are followed by his repentance such that he leads an austere lifestyle--totally at odds with an emerging love of sensuous beauty. However, the incident of a young girl wading into the sea appears as an ethereal vision which completely transforms his perspective and develops his aesthetic theory which asserts "…. art as stasis and separates beauty from good or evil…"