Ships and Boats in James Joyce: Representing Arrested Development in the Modernist Bildungsroman
Two major literary changes coincide between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century : on the one hand the traditional Bildungsroman is replaced by its modernist counterpart, which features adolescent protagonists whose development into mature adults in never achieved ; on t...
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| Publicado no: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/trans, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicado em: |
TRANS-
2017
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| Acesso em linha: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Resumo: | Two major literary changes coincide between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century : on the one hand the traditional Bildungsroman is replaced by its modernist counterpart, which features adolescent protagonists whose development into mature adults in never achieved ; on the other hand, the traditional genre of sea adventure tales is replaced by more introspective narrations, anticipating many of the aspects that will become characterising features of Modernism – in particular, the overall dystopic representation of the sea and of the aquatic element in general. In the work of James Joyce, the concurrence of these two literary transformations distinctly stands out ; from those short stories in Dubliners (1914) centred on childhood and adolescence, to the anti-developmental novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), the marine/aquatic dimension both symbolises and determines the condition of arrested development of the young protagonists. In this article, I particularly focus on the maritime element of the ship and put in evidence how, in modernist fiction but especially for the Joycean characters, it loses its traditional rite-of-passage function. |
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