A New Approach To Joyce: The Portrait Of The Artist As A Guidebook
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few works in the canon of modernist literature have provoked as much scholarly debate as James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Robert S. Ryf's landmark critical study cuts through decades of competing interpretations to offer a strikingly original framework for understanding it. Rather than treating the novel as a straightforward bildungsroman or a veiled autobiography, Ryf argues that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man functions as a guidebook — a deliberate, structurally encoded key to the entire Joycean universe — illuminating the symbolic systems, aesthetic philosophies, and narrative techniques that animate Joyce's later, more labyrinthine masterworks. Published by the University of California Press in 1964, this rigorous and intellectually invigorating work presents Ryf's case with meticulous close reading and a clarity of argument that makes it accessible to both the seasoned Joyce scholar and the curious newcomer. The study situates A Portrait at the very centre of Joyce's creative architecture, demonstrating how its themes of exile, epiphany, and artistic self-fashioning reverberate through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For anyone seeking to genuinely understand Joyce's genius, Ryf's work is not merely a companion — it is an indispensable map.
Author: Robert S. Ryf
Format: Paperback
Published: 1964, University of California Press
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few works in the canon of modernist literature have provoked as much scholarly debate as James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Robert S. Ryf's landmark critical study cuts through decades of competing interpretations to offer a strikingly original framework for understanding it. Rather than treating the novel as a straightforward bildungsroman or a veiled autobiography, Ryf argues that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man functions as a guidebook — a deliberate, structurally encoded key to the entire Joycean universe — illuminating the symbolic systems, aesthetic philosophies, and narrative techniques that animate Joyce's later, more labyrinthine masterworks. Published by the University of California Press in 1964, this rigorous and intellectually invigorating work presents Ryf's case with meticulous close reading and a clarity of argument that makes it accessible to both the seasoned Joyce scholar and the curious newcomer. The study situates A Portrait at the very centre of Joyce's creative architecture, demonstrating how its themes of exile, epiphany, and artistic self-fashioning reverberate through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For anyone seeking to genuinely understand Joyce's genius, Ryf's work is not merely a companion — it is an indispensable map.