In chapter two of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Cranly and Stephen discuss the latter’s plans for the future. During their exchange, Cranly recalls Stephen’s wrangling with a school acquaintance about the shortest way from the Sallygap to Larras. A voice spoke softly to Stephen’s lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that…
Tag: portrait of the artist as a young man
A Portrait of the Project: our official website is announced!
I’m delighted to announce that the Nation, Genre and Gender Project’s official website is now up and running! We created this site (in association with Vermillion Design) in order to showcase some of what we do here at Nation, Genre and Gender, when we’re not overthinking Jane Austen’s novels or identifying weird gender tropes in…
Image of the Week: Portrait of a frustrated artist
This week’s image is taken from Chapter 17 of Katherine Cecil Thurston’s beautifully illustrated novel Max (1910). It is one of eight illustrations by the British painter and illustrator Frank Craig (1874-1918). The image effectively captures Max’s growing frustration at the quality of his/her latest work and captures the moments leading up to a heated exchange between the…
Image of the Week: Clongowes College in 1898
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen Dedalus recalls his schooldays, spent at the boarding school Clongowes Wood College: It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from…
A disappointing lack of Easter eggs
In our novels, relatively little happens at Easter, although it’s mentioned incidentally quite a bit, generally as a marker of the passage of time – things are due to happen before or after Easter but rarely take place on the holiday itself. One of the few mentions of anything actually taking place during Easter is…
Ladies and Gentlemen: visualising character mentions by gender in the novels
In early 2015, Adam Calhoun created a (now quite famous) series of images that visualise the punctuation from famous novels. These rather lovely images demonstrate clearly how differently writing can be structured, particularly in regard to features like punctuation: hiding in plain sight, punctuation renders writing intelligible, but goes practically unnoticed by the reader. (Until…
The Sea of Books 