"This is an important book by a major Joyce scholar. It is original and unconventional, and I suspect that it will be controversial, but from this point on everyone writing on Portrait, and maybe on Joyce generally, will have to come to terms with Thornton's argument."—Patrick A. McCarthy, University of Miami
"This is the most interesting and challenging discussion of Portrait I have read in quite a while. . . . His argument has such inherent power and is made with such command and force that I have no doubt that this will be seen as one of the major discussions of the novel."—Richard Fallis
Description
“Enter these enchanted woods ye who dare,” is the famous, dictum from Sean O’Faolain about Portrait. As with all of Joyce’s works, Portrait rewards its readers, over and over again, with its inexhaustible richness. It is a most enveloping and enchanting book, and Weldon Thornton’s latest exploration of its world makes a major contribution to Joyce scholarship.
Thornton takes a fresh look at important psychological and cultural issues in the novel, arguing that although it may be a classic text of literary modernism, it’ is a fundamentally antimodernist work. The novel reflects a distance between Joyce and Stephen not simply in its tone or in certain differences between author and character but in its very structure and verbal texture. Thornton’s comprehensive and thoughtful book provides readers with a new cultural critique and intellectual history of Portrait, which promises to become one of the major discussions of the novel.
About the Author
Weldon Thornton is professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated and J. M. Synge and the Western World.
February 1994