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Hello many novelists choose their own young life as the subject for their first book

but very few have subjected themselves

to the scrutiny of the great Irish novelist James Joyce. In a portrait of the artist as a young

man, published in 1916, Joyce followed his alter ego Stephen Deadless from babyhood to young adulthood.

He takes us from Stephen wetting the bed through a teenage visit to a prostitute and on through religious

terrors to the prospect of freedom. When it was published the book met

with shock at its graphic honesty as well as with great praise. Joyce shows Stephen wrestling with the oppressive forces of his family, his church and his nation.

Yet this was not simply a youthful terrain.

Joyce's novel is also experimental and takes us deep into Stephen Saike.

And since its publication almost a century ago, it's a large influence on novelists across the world.

With me to discuss a portrait of the artist as a young man, a Roy Foster, Carol Professor of Irish

History and Fellow of Hartford College, Oxford, Catherine Mullin, Senior Lecture in English Literature

at the University of Leeds, and Jerry Johnson Johnson Senior Fellow in English Exeter College

Oxford Royfossett. Can you give us something of the social and political landscape

...