With an Introduction by Hugh Kenner and a New Afterword A masterpiece of modern fiction, James Joyce’s semiautobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist’s life. “I will not serve,” vows Dedalus, “that in which I no longer believe.…and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can.” To Dedalus, the artist is like God—one who “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Joyce’s rendering of the impressions of childhood broke ground in the use of language. “He took on the almost infinite English language,” Jorge Luis Borges once said. “He wrote in a language invented by himself.…Joyce brought a new music to English.” As a bold literary experiment, this classic has had a huge and lasting influence on the contemporary novel. Joyce's semi-autobiographical chronicle of Stephen Dedalus' passage from university student to "independent" artist is at once a richly detailed, amusing, and moving coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique, and a profound examination of the Irish psyche and society.

This work it is written however with the intention of making it fit for general use. With a view to render it acceptable to young readers, it is illustrated with many engravings exhibiting the principal heathen deities as the ancients were accustomed to represent them. A familiar style has also been adopted and a variety of curious anecdotes have been selected, from the memoirs of gods, goddesses and heroes.

Includes "War supplements," Jan-Nov. 1918; "Supplements, " Dec. 1918-Nov. 1919. These were also issued as reprints

Each of James Joyce's major works appeared in a year defined by armed conflict in Ireland or continental Europe: Dubliners in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the same year as the 1916 Easter Rising; Ulysses in February 1922, two months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a few months before the outbreak of the Irish Civil War; and Finnegans Wake in 1939, as Joyce complained that the German army's westward advances upstaged the novel's release. In Joyce and Militarism, Greg Winston considers these masterworks in light of the longstanding shadows that military culture and ideology cast over the society in which the writer lived and wrote. The first book-length study of its kind, this articulate volume offers original and interesting insights into Joyce's response to the military presence in everything from education and athletics to prostitution and public space.