This chapter traces the emergence of Joyce’s aesthetic from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, analyzing the development of Stephen Dedalus as would-be artist in the context of Irish colonial experience. It pays particular attention to the influence of Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde’s Picture of Doran Gray and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist belong to the Bildungsroman tradition, that is, to the novel of development, which their narratives challenge and transform by presenting the central character’s growth to maturity as deviating from cultural expectations rather than fulfilling them. Joyce’s narrative, however, points toward a new nation’s emergence.

The Dubliners stories arose from a chance opportunity when George Russell, a prominent revivalist figure, invited Joyce to make a little money by submitting stories to The Irish Homestead. Russell didn’t want the readers to be disconcerted – but that would precisely be the effect of Joyce’s stories. Eventually published ten years later, having overcome threats of censorship and libel law, the expanded collection made a significant intervention in the Irish Literary Revival, pointing unerringly at some unpleasant truths and establishing Joyce as a noted prose realist who disrupted a movement more associated with poets and dramatists. These stories would later come to be seen also as key documents in the development of modernist fiction, their naturalism tempered by symbolism and a multi-layered interpretative openness that makes them among the most prized of modern short stories.

When W. B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, he singled out his contribution to theatre as one of his main achievements. The critical consensus since his death has not shared this view, and his theatrical work has largely been overlooked. This book contends that Yeats is not only an important modernist playwright, but also a thinker about theatre whose originality can be compared to that of Brecht or Artaud.

Some critics polarize Joyce and Yeats by invoking the Irish Literary Revival. This practice, which can seem unduly based on sectarian divisions, the politics of post-1916 Ireland, and the retrospective formulation of ‘Modernism’, fails to address adequately Yeats’s and Joyce’s common origins in the Aesthetic and Symbolist ethos of the 1890s, their common dedication to ‘the religion of art’. Yeats’s profound influence on Joyce attaches Joyce to the Revival, as does the struggle between different brands of cultural nationalism as represented by Joyce in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Walter Pater was fundamentally important to the aesthetics of both Yeats and Joyce; the Paterian ‘epiphany’ as a symbolic structure bridges their poetry and prose; and Charles Stewart Parnell, who can assume qualities of Pater’s ‘artist-hero’, complements Pater in his importance to both: to their dialectics between art and history. The chapter ends with a discussion of some startling thematic overlaps c. 1914 between Yeats’s Responsibilities and Joyce’s Portrait.