The first novel James Joyce embarked on could hardly be called modernist. Stephen Hero, probably started in Dublin in 1903 when Joyce was twenty-one, was to be a thinly disguised autobiography, stylistically undistinguished and immensely long. When he abandoned it, in Trieste in 1905, he referred to the 914 pages he had written as “about half the book.” Its planned sixty-three chapters would have told the story of a Dublin boy growing up in an increasingly impoverished middle-class family, throwing off the shackles of Catholicism and bourgeois convention, and embarking upon the lonely path of the writer determined to expose his society's failings. The title, combining a formula from ancient Greek tragedy with the name of the young protagonist, suggests the kind of ironic distancing Joyce was to exploit later in his career. It is hard to discern irony in the eleven chapters that survive: the accounts of the inner world of Joyce's alter ego Stephen Daedalus, and of his interactions with his fellow university students, are not mediated by any sense of stylistic shaping and verbal economy, and as a result feel too close to their subject matter to allow for the play of distancing.

When Joyce recommenced his semi-autobiographical project in 1907, it was with a very different approach to the task. He had in the meantime completed Dubliners, and in writing those stories had developed an art of economy and compression that makes Stephen Hero seem positively elephantine (curiously, Joyce pursued the two projects side by side, without any apparent stylistic interference between them).