Strongly autobiographical and exuberantly inventive in its style, Joyce's great novel charts the Dublin childhood and youth of Stephen Dedalus.
Shaped by his experiences of early life at home where his father exerts a powerful influence, through bullying at school to an adolescent crisis of faith and student days, Stephen gradually emerges with a sense of his own destiny as poet, patriot and unbeliever. Determined to create his own individual voice while acknowledging his link with the community, his avowed aim is "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race".