SOURCE: Riquelme, John Paul. “Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy.” In The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge, pp. 103-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Riquelme traces the development of Stephen Daedalus as an artist in Joyce's novels.

Towards a Stylistic History: from Stephen Hero to Ulysses

Near the end of what has survived of Joyce's unfinished draft of an autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero [SH] (written in 1904-5), the central character, Stephen Daedalus, claims that one function of writing is ‘to record … epiphanies with extreme care’, since ‘they … are the most delicate and evanescent of moments’ (SH 211). In the same passage he defines an epiphany as ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’. Stephen's statement...