In this study of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the author considers the important psychological and cultural issues arising in the novel. He argues that although Portrait may be a classic text of literary modernism, it is a fundamentally antimodernist work. To demonstrate this reading, Thornton first provides three contexts for reading the novel: the issue of defining modernism, especially the philosophical roots and implications of the modernist view of the self; Joyce's literary aims; and the genre of the Bildungsroman. The novel itself is then examined in detail, with the focus on its overall structure, the verbal presentation of Stephen's milieu, and the uses of motif and allusion. Thornton's comprehensive study offers readers a cultural critique and intellectual history of Portrait, and aims to provide a major basis for discussion of the novel.