The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus: The Conflict of the Generations in James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

In his pursuit of the unknown in Joyce’s works, Edmund Epstein has made new discoveries of Joyce through an astonishing range of refer­ences and documentation, from Hebrew to Classical and modern European thought. This book will be of immediate and invaluable significance not only to Joyce scholars but to students and readers of modern literature in general. The pattern Epstein sees in Joyce’s works is the conflict of genera­tions, the recurring pattern of human nature which Joyce sought to discover and describe. Mr. Epstein follows Joyce’s working of the process through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to its climax in Ulysses, and constantly refers to Finnegans Wake for corroboration and perspective. Valuable in itself for its new reading of Joyce, Epstein’s work offers new interpretations of themes and symbols which have heretofore puzzled Joyce scholars. [by] Edmund L. Epstein. Bibliography: P. [209]-214.