Stephen Hero

Stephen Hero

First edition
Author	James Joyce
Cover artist	N. I. Cannon
Language	English
Genre	Autobiographical, Modernism
Publisher	Jonathan Cape
Publication date	1944
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)

Stephen Hero is a posthumously published autobiographical novel by Irish author James Joyce.^[1] It is the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Its published form reflects only a portion of the manuscript: the first 518 pages have disappeared; 383 pages remain.^[2]

Joyce introduced the concept of “epiphany” in Stephen Hero to preface a discussion of Thomas Aquinas’s three criteria of beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance: when the object “seems to us radiant, [it] achieves its epiphany.” ^[3] The term isn’t used when Stephen Dedalus covers the same ground in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Stephen Hero the protagonist thinks of recording epiphanies in a book^[3].There’s a reference to Stephen Dedalus’s collection of epiphanies in Ulysses.^[4] Joyce himself recorded over seventy epiphanies, of which forty have survived.^[5]

Background

Work on Stephen Hero probably began in Dublin in 1903.^[6] According to Derek Attridge, it was to be "a thinly disguised autobiography, stylistically undistinguished and immensely long."^[6]

Joyce abandoned the work in Trieste in 1905.^[6] Sylvia Beach, to whom Joyce gave the surviving pages, wrote that, "When the manuscript came back to its author, after the twentieth publisher had rejected it, he threw it in the fire, from which Mrs. Joyce, at the risk of burning her hands, record these pages." Biographer Herbert Gorman supported this claim which has been widely reported.^[7] It has been noted that no surviving parts of the manuscript have any signs of burning.^[8]

References

Further reading

• "Recommended by Our Reviewers". Books Abroad. 38 (1): 81. 1 January 1964. JSTOR 40118511.
• Bradley, John L. (1 July 1956). "Review". Books Abroad. 30 (3): 333. doi:10.2307/40096340. JSTOR 40096340.
• Colangelo, Jeremy (2014). "The Grotesque Gigantic: Stephen Hero, Maximalism, and Bakhtin". Joyce Studies Annual. 2014 (1): 63–92.
• Fargnoli, A. Nicholas; Michael Patrick Gillespie (1 January 2006). "Stephen Hero". Critical Companion to James Joyce: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. pp. 154–159. ISBN 9781438108483.
• Jacobs, Joshua (1 April 2000). "Joyce's Epiphanic Mode: Material Language and the Representation of Sexuality in Stephen Hero and Portrait". Twentieth Century Literature. 46 (1): 20–33. doi:10.2307/441931. JSTOR 441931.
• Miller, Nolan (1 December 1956). "Joyce and Wolfe". The Antioch Review. 16 (4): 511–517. doi:10.2307/4609918. JSTOR 4609918.

• Prescott, Joseph (1 April 1954). "James Joyce's "Stephen Hero"". The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 53 (2): 214–223. JSTOR 27713665.
• Stern, Richard G. (1 July 1956). "Proust and Joyce Underway: Jean Santeuil and Stephen Hero". The Kenyon Review. 18 (3): 486–496. JSTOR 4333694.
• Troy, William (11 February 1945). "Books: Stephen Dedalus- in the Rough". New York Times.
• Walbank, Alan (1965). "Stephen Hero's Bookshops." The Book Collector 14 no 2 (summer): 194-199.

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