Stephen Hero
Stephen Hero is a posthumously published autobiographical novel by Irish author James Joyce.
It is the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Its published form reflects only a portion of the manuscript: the first 518 pages have disappeared; 383 pages remain.
Joyce introduced the concept of “epiphany” in Stephen Hero to preface a discussion of Thomas Aquinas’s three criteria of beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance: when the object “seems to us radiant, [it] achieves its epiphany.” The term isn’t used when Stephen Dedalus covers the same ground in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Stephen Hero the protagonist thinks of recording epiphanies in a book.There’s a reference to Stephen Dedalus’s collection of epiphanies in Ulysses. Joyce himself recorded over seventy epiphanies, of which forty have survived.
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