By 1906, as he was writing the later stories in what was to become Dubliners, Joyce had written 1,000 or so manuscript pages of an autobiographical novel, to which he gave the title Stephen Hero. This novel appears to have been designed to actualize, at length and in abundance, the affirmation of soul or self that Joyce had declared to be inhibited or absent in Dublin life. It was a fictionalized autobiography, which followed through the formation of the artistic personality of Stephen Dedalus, in reaction against the narrowing and constraining influences of family, church, and state. Where Dubliners was caught between the desire to portray the soullessness of Irish life, and the compulsion to evoke that soul through its writing, Stephen Hero offers a much more emphatic and visible display of what Keats called ‘soul-making’. The self whose formation Joyce set out to affirm and display in Stephen Hero was no longer an implicit, collective self, but a realized, individual self. The pages of the novel that survive cover Stephen's years at University College Dublin, years in which he is forming his artistic consciousness and conscience. The narrative is for the most part a series of reports on encounters between the isolated, sensitive, and stubborn young aesthete and the narrowness, conformity, and squalor of the world that surrounds him. In nearly all of these encounters, Stephen is shown as victorious, either through the exercise of devastating polemic, or by maintaining a haughty silence which lures his adversaries into betraying their vulgarity and narrowness. Many of Stephen's encounters with other characters are in the form of exchanges designed to exemplify Stephen's superiority of intellect and spirit. We are given fragments of conversations with the fellow student McCann, a feminist and advanced thinker, which purport to show Stephen riddling his theories ‘with agile bullets’ (SH 49);