Why am I passionate about this?
I have always felt like an outsider and so have been preoccupied by questions of identity and belonging. In my youth, I became fascinated by the great Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and their struggles with such questions after my family moved from Ulster to Scotland. As a young academic in Brisbane, I encountered fierce debates about Australian national identity as it shifted from a British heritage to a multicultural society. In the flux of the modern world, our identities are always under challenge and often require painful renovation.
John's book list on nationalism and identity
Why did John love this book?
Discovering Joyce in my youth was a revelation. In this fictionalised autobiography, Joyce rejects Yeats’s Irish folk models, seeking to emancipate the individual from the nets of family, religion, and nationality.
Whereas the early Yeats romanticises the idea of blood sacrifice for Mother Ireland, Joyce has his hero, Stephen Dedalus, declare Ireland is the old sow that devours her own farrow. Stephen flees Dublin for Europe, choosing the vocation of the cosmopolitan artist who, from exile, will liberate his benighted nation.
Like Yeats, Joyce remains obsessed with Ireland and the tension between the national and the universal.
6 authors picked A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A masterpiece of modern fiction, James Joyce's semiautobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist's life.
"I will not serve," vows Dedalus, "that in which I no longer believe...and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can." Likening himself to God, Dedalus notes that the artist "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Joyce's rendering of the impressions of…