This casebook offers a comprehensive introduction to this landmark in modern fiction. The essays collected here will help first-time readers, teachers, and advanced scholars gain new insight into Joyce''s semi-autobiographical story of an Irish boy''s slow and difficult discovery of his artistic vocation. Mark Wollaeger''s introduction provides an overview of the composition and early reception of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as a survey of some of the recurrent issues debated by literary critics. Essays by Hugh Kenner and Patrick Parrinder offer both indispensable overviews of the entire novel-its themes, structure, and idiom-and close attention to specific interpretive cruxes. Other essays include classic responses by Wayne Booth, Fritz Senn, Michael Levenson, Helene Cixous, and a newly revised and expanded version of Maud Ellmann''s groundbreaking "Polytropic Man." Together the essays bring into focus the wide range of questions that have kept A Portrait fresh for the new millennium.