The Right to the City: Re-presentations of Dublin in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Abstract

Dublin, claimed Augustine Martin in 1984, is ‘the most famous city in literary history, with the possible exception of Troy’. 3 But which Dublin? It seems clear that Martin had not just a specific place but also a specific time in mind when he made his claim — the early twentieth-century town made famous in the work of James Joyce. It is true that the great writer ’s work has certainly come to represent one dominant image of the city, both within Ireland and abroad. Joyce’s Dublin was a composite of the various layers which had contributed to the emergence of the modern city up to the late nineteenth century — Viking trading town, colonial buttress, Georgian capital, industrial slum and, in the words of Declan Kiberd, ‘a classic example of a periphery­dominated-centre’. 4 The literary city represented by Joyce, however, is but one moment in the cultural history of a complex, living entity moving in time as well as in space. Even as Martin was writing, new ‘Dublins’ were emerging — post-industrial sprawl, misplanned conurbation, heroin capital of Europe — a spatial organization incorporating a wide range of diverse and amorphous micro-communities: self-conscious bourgeoisie, increasingly internationalized working class, criminal cadre schooled on Hollywood. In 1984 the city was in the process of becoming, in the words of Fintan O’Toole, ‘a frontier town, on the edge of Europe, on the edge of the Irish nation, on the edge of itself’. 5 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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