A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract

Chapter 3 examines Flaubertian intertextuality in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It considers references to Flaubert’s letters in the novel (with a particular focus on Stephen’s borrowed analogy between the artist and the God of Creation) and argues that although Stephen Dedalus may be wrestling with something resembling Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, Joyce himself had already, even at this relatively early stage in his writing career, come to see his relationship to Flaubert as a matter of playful engagement rather than of rivalrous angst. It also considers Joyce’s engagement with Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine, the likely connection between the contrapuntal structures of A Portrait and L’éducation sentimentale (whereby characters alternate between states of exhilaration and disillusionment), and both authors’ cultivation of effects of contrast and simultaneity.

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