Joyce's metamorphosis

"The Joyce critic Stanley Sultan describes his newest book as philological biography. Using the fiction the young James Joyce was writing from 1904 to 1906, he traces the process by which Joyce evolved into the mature artist. Sultan argues that Joyce enriched his fiction with a "poetics of autobiography," a series of elegant strategies that made him his own esoteric subject and that reached its final stage in Finnegans Wake."--BOOK JACKET.