According to Virginia Woolf human character may have changed “on or about December, 1910”, but in James Joyce's manuscripts this change took place a few years earlier. In Joyce's writings, the literary transition from realism to modernism happened between 1905 and 1907. His later novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), is now regarded as a prototype of a modernist novel, though in its composition it started as something completely different.

On 7 January 1904, Joyce completed an essay entitled “A Portrait of the Artist” for the Irish magazine Dana. The editors John Eglinton and Frederick Ryan had commissioned the text but when they received Joyce's essay, they declined it. The piece

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Published 25 October 2002

Citation: Van Hulle, Dirk. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". The Literary Encyclopedia. 25 October 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2606, accessed 9 February 2010.]