From its earliest Viking origins, Dublin was part of a networked Atlantic geography of exchange. Throughout its history, Dublin’s place in world literature has been influenced by the shifting shapes of those networks over time.Eighteenth-century, literary Dublin, for instance, was determined by the gravitational field of London, while by the middle of the nineteenth century, Dublin would have become the point of origin for a transnational diaspora– an origin akin to a wound from which the blood is being drained: insular, entrophic, and suffering (in James Joyce’s phrase fromDubliners) from paralysis. Joyce is the pivotal figure here, insofar as he was to see how the city’s insular, embedded sense of place could co-exist with a generative sense of incompleteness, an awareness of the phantom limb of the global network of which the city was a part, capable of being sutured by imagination.That suturing effect would also, paradoxically, reposition what had become a peripheral city to the centre of modernist writing, notably in Joyce’s Ulysses. Finally, with Dublin today one of the most globalised cities in the world, literary form is being once more reconfigured as networks shift and are again radically decentred.

Where the inner suburbs of south Dublin were Victorian, most of the development on the north side of the city has taken place in the twentieth century, so that historical layers – Georgian, Victorian, twentieth-century, and contemporary – sit adjacent to one another. Anne Enright’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Gathering, makes use of this stratified cityscape, but it figures elsewhere, as well, including in recent crime fiction. As we move towards the old docklands in the north city, we find ourselves in a completely new cityscape, which is beginning to be explored by writers such as Paul Murray, while the older neighbourhoods nearby have been the territory of Conor McPherson’s plays; it was here, too, that Bram Stoker was born. However, the real challenge for contemporary Irish writing has been to invest the new largely working-class suburbs of north Dublin with the same kind of dense cultural associations as the historic city centre. The central figures here have been Paula Meehan, Dermot Bolger, and Roddy Doyle, whose fictional Barrytown is based on Kilbarrack where he grew up. Finally, at the limits of the city, we come to Howth, where Joyce’s Ulysses reaches its conclusion.

George Bernard Shaw was once asked if Ireland would ever stop producing great actors, to which he reputedly replied: ‘I’m afraid not.’ The same could be said of Dublin and writers.

To put that continuing deluge of words in context, history makes a good place to start. While there have been histories of Dublin since at least John T. Gilbert’s epic three volume tome (1854–1859), David Dickson’s Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (London: Profile, 2014) is the lively, authoritative, standard work, and is likely to remain so for many years; the book you are reading is much indebted to it. The same author’s The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021) makes a useful supplement.

In many cities, it is often assumed that the residential suburbs are not the sort of place in which literary culture thrives. And, indeed, the work of one of the most prominent writers associated with the suburbs of south Dublin – Eavan Boland – has taken this idea as a major theme in her work. However, a closer analysis shows that south Dublin has long had rich literary associations, and it is this intersection of private and public that is the focus of this chapter. It was here that both James Joyce and G. B. Shaw were born, and where W. B. Yeats lived. The area was also a hive of activity during the Irish Literary Revival, whether in the school run by Patrick Pearse, or in the literary salons of George Russell (Æ). More recently, it has been associated with poets such as Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as with Booker-winning novelist Anne Enright, whose novel Actress provides the chapter with a starting point. Far from being the quiet annex to the boisterous city-centre literary pubs, the south Dublin suburbs have been the site of intense literary activity of many kinds for the more than a century, a place where the intersections of public and private can be explored.

Dublin: A Writer’s City begins with a personal introduction, in which the author reflects on his arrival in the city in the mid-1980s, and his realization during his very first hours there that he was living a few doors down from where Oscar Wilde had been born, on a street that features in Ulysses, in the stories of Samuel Beckett, and in the poetry of Thomas Kinsella – and around the corner from the site of the first production of what would become the Abbey Theatre. This initial stroll down an apparently innocuous street – Westland Row – provides the basis for a reflection on the ways in which being aware of the literature of a city influence our experience of urban living. These reflections are framed in the context of the empty city during the pandemic that began in the spring of 2020.

A defining characteristic of Dublin has been its repurposed Georgian buildings. Most of the north inner city was originally laid out as homes for the wealthy in the eighteenth century. However, by the nineteenth century the great city mansions of the north city were on their way to becoming some of the worst tenement slums in Europe; and much of the development of the twentieth century was focused on finding better accommodation for the tenement-dwellers. And yet the tenements and surrounding areas have produced a rich literary culture. The best-known example may be Seán O’Casey; however, there are others, including James Stephens, James Plunkett, Paula Meehan, and, of course, this part of the city is also closely linked with James Joyce’s writing, with substantial parts of Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners set here. It was also here that Brendan Behan grew up, and his work revolves around this area. In addition there are unexpected associations, such as the birthplace of Iris Murdoch. This chapter explores this literary world of the north inner city, in which sometimes extreme poverty and a vibrant sense of community coexist.

The campus of Trinity College Dublin is a paradox; on the one hand, it is a enclosed campus, cut off from the city around it by walls and gates; on the other, it is situated in the very heart of the city. Among its graduates are many of Ireland’s major writers, from George Farquhar in the seventeenth century, to Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith in the eighteenth century, to Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth century, and J. M. Synge in the early twentieth century. In the 1960s, many of the poets who would dominate Irish poetry in the decades that followed were students or staff: Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanéin, Brendan Kennelly, and Paula Meehan. More recently, novelists Anne Enright and Sally Rooney have been graduates. This chapter looks at how over the centuries, the distinctive nature of Trinity’s space within the city – both enclosed and yet permeable – has provided a kind of oasis for conversation and writing, while still actively engaging with the life of the city around it.

The first chapter of Dublin: A Writer’s City provides a succinct historical framework for the spatial exploration of the city that follows, keyed to a series of historical colour maps. It begins with the earliest pre-Viking settlement, moving on to trace the evolution of Dublin from a seasonal Viking port to a walled medieval city by the beginning of the seventeenth century. From that small medieval city, Dublin in the eighteenth century grew to be a major European capital, site of a vibrant literary and print culture, which in turn gave rise to figures such as Jonathan Swift. Dublin continued to grow through the nineteenth century, until we arrive at the city of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1904. From that point onwards, the footprint of the city changes radically, as the old Georgian core is either demolished or repurposed, and new suburbs grow around the city, and these in turn develop their own literary cultures. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that we can imagine Dublin in terms of the rings in a tree, growing outwards from its historic core to new communities, each of which has a distinctive character that has been both chronicled and produced by its writers.

More than a century on, the modern history of Dublin continues to be dominated by the Easter Rising of 1916. Although the Rising took place all over the city, its focal point was the General Post Office, on O’Connell Street. This chapter takes as its keynote a paradox that emerges in the literature of O’Connell Street. On the one hand, it is here that a rebellion led by poets and playwrights has produced a site with a solemn historical memory attached to it. At the same time, the street itself has long had a carnivalesque quality, made possible by its original design as a place in which fashionable citizens could promenade, and continuing today. This tension emerges in major works by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Seán O’Casey, and W. B. Yeats, as well as by more recent writers, including Roddy Doyle. The sense of paradox is heightened by the proximity of the Abbey Theatre, on the adjacent Abbey Street. Here, a living theatre culture carries on a tradition begun by Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, contributing to the distinctive character of this part of the city as a kind unruly ceremonial centre.

The second chapter of Dublin: A Writer’s City explores what, for many people, is the lasting image of Dublin literary culture: the world of the Dublin literary pubs in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This was a very public literary culture, in which novelists, poets, and playwrights were familiar figures on Dublin streets, and engaged in lively newspaper debates. The principal players here are Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Flann O’Brien, who were regulars in pubs such as McDaid’s. Many of the writers of this era also lived in what has subsequently become known as ‘Baggotonia’, an area around Baggot Street Bridge in which Georgian and Victorian houses had been broken up into affordable flats. Writers living in this area included Thomas Kinsella, Leland Bardwell, John Banville, and John Montague; it also was home to the Pike Theatre, where Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had its Irish premiere. The chapter ends with a reflection on the impact of changing property values in this area, today one of the most expensive parts of the city, and hence one in which few writers now live.

Sometimes, a geographical feature can stamp itself on the character of a place. In the case of the south coast of Dublin, the expanse of sea and sky has led more than one writer to ask – in more than one way – “am I walking into eternity on Sandymount Strand?” (as Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses). It was here that the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney lived and wrote for many years, just down the coast from the Martello tower that features in Ulysses. A little further along the coast again is the pier at Dún Laoghaire, associated with a pivotal passage in Samuel Beckett’s work. Even as it looks outwards, however, Dublin’s south coast has a long association with wealth and privilege, from the secluded villas of the eighteenth century to the property boom of the early twenty-first century. This is reflected in work extending from Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee to contemporary fiction by Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, and the satire of Paul Howard, and the number of contemporary Dublin crime novels associated with the area.