The Problem of Stephen Dedalus is one of the most curious and interesting in modern letters. One aspect of the problem has been brought to our attention recently in a very impressive book by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961). Mr. Booth notes that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not, by its first readers, thought to be an ironic work. It was after the publication of Ulysses, with its presentation of Stephen as the fallen Icarus, that the reassessment of Stephen's character began; and it was the publication of the Stephen Hero fragment in 1944 which really accelerated the movement toward a view of the novel as mainly ironic, with Stephen seen as a posturing esthete rather than an actual or even a potential artist. The most extreme version of this ironic view of Stephen has been proposed by Hugh Kenner, in his Dublin's Joyce (1955).