Romantic irony: The bridge between the romantic and the modernist artist in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (original) (raw)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be interpreted as a Kunstleroman, a novel of an artist’s development, in which the literary trajectory of Stephen Dedalus is depicted. We will trace the artist’s evolution from young Stephen’s ideas about art, strongly influenced by romantic principles, to Stephen’s final assertion as an artist in the elaboration of his modernist autobiography. The distance between the young and the mature Stephen, evolving from a romantic position to a modernist one, provokes the main irony in the novel, the opposition between the young Stephen’s open defence of romantic principles and the mature Stephen’s modernist style. Thus, the elusion of the author, hidden in an indirect interior monologue, is not authentic. The narrator is brought to light by the use of this same narrative technique discovering him as a modernist artist, contrary to his ideas of youth. This irony may be classified as romantic irony. We also suggest that a similar evolution to the o...