A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the context of "James Joyce"

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos (c. 1915–1962).

Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold".

Clongowes Wood College SJ is a Catholic voluntary boarding school for boys near Clane, County Kildare, Ireland, founded by the Jesuits in 1814. It features prominently in James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Blessed John Sullivan (Jesuit) taught at Clongowes Wood College from 1907 until his death in 1933. One of five Jesuit secondary schools in Ireland, it had 450 students in 2019.

The school's current headmaster, Christopher Lumb, is the first lay headmaster in its history.

Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and as a major character in his modernist novel Ulysses (1922). Stephen mirrors many facets of Joyce's own life and personality. Joyce was a talented singer, for example, and in Ulysses Leopold Bloom notes the excellence of Stephen's tenor voice after hearing him sing Johannes Jeep's song "Von der Sirenen Listigkeit".

In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait, Stephen's surname is spelled "Daedalus," a more obvious allusion to the mythological figure Daedalus, a brilliant artificer who constructed a pair of wings for himself and his son Icarus as a means of escaping the island of Crete, where they had been imprisoned by King Minos. Buck Mulligan makes reference to Stephen's mythic namesake in Ulysses, telling him, "Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!" His surname also suggests his desire to "fly" above the constraints of religion, nationality, and politics in his development as an artist. Daedalus had been contracted by King Minos to build the Labyrinth in which he would imprison his wife's son the Minotaur. Stephen's surname may also reflect the labyrinthine quality of his developmental journey in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen's first name recalls the first Christian martyr. The theme of martyrdom runs throughout the novel.

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.