A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Welcome to the digital multimedia edition of James Joyce’s first novel, created by a team from University College Dublin as part of the Decade of Centenaries (2012-2022), which celebrates Irish history and cultural heritage.
This edition reproduces the text of the first publication of this novel as a single volume, by B. W. Huebsch Inc, in New York, 1916. Our edition is available to download as a free audiobook, recorded by Irish actors Sam and Barry McGovern, as well as in Kindle. It can also be explored chapter by chapter on this site.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of UCD Research and the Irish Research Council in the creation of this edition.
Characters in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
As the 2016 preface to the digital multimedia edition of the novel points out, James Joyce’s Portrait records a complex set of social interactions which revolve primarily around the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, but which involve an extensive host of other characters including schoolboys, priests, and prostitutes, alongside a variety of other inhabitants of early 20th-century Dublin and Cork. This animated network, created as part of our sister project Nation, Genre and Gender, demonstrates the social circumstances of the Dedalus family throughout the novel, and highlights their increasing isolation as their finances and respectability decline, chapter by chapter.