James Joyce published four major prose works – Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916 US, 1917 GB), of which a partial early draft, Stephen Hero (1904–7), was published in 1944, Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939) – and a play, Exiles (1918). All represent Ireland with scrupulous attention to historical and local detail, and yet none stems directly, or exclusively, from the British literary canon. What Stephen Dedalus admires in A Portrait is European. He thinks, as he walks to the university, about Gerhart Hauptmann, John Henry Newman, Guido Cavalcanti, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. As Anthony Burgess remarks: ‘Add Blake, Bruno, Vico, and you have very nearly the entire Joyce library.’ He is a young man deeply interested in ideas, particularly aesthetic ones, and by the end of the novel he is thinking thoughts that would not be approved of by the Catholic church of his time, or the benighted Irish under its influence. In a post-Wildean way, ‘The young men in the college regarded art as a continental vice.’ Indeed, sex haunts the aesthete too, however idealistic he seems to be, and they were partly right about Stephen, for his most visionary experience in Portrait (of the girl he sees on the seashore) only narrowly transcends a sexual response.