The first UNESCO âCities of Literature Conferenceâ was hosted in Dublin in June 2016 presenting the Irish capital as a creative, literary city and celebrating Irelandâs literary icons. Claiming that Dublin âhas words in its bloodâ, the project explored Irelandâs literary traditions across a range of urban settings and continued work on the importance of literature to Dublin which has been ongoing since the city was designated as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2010.1 Literature is of great significance not only to Dublin but to all Irish cities. Each of Irelandâs ten cities, both north and south of the border, has its own recognisable literary heritage which has evolved over time and through a variety of authors and literary styles. Equally, the cities themselves have been and are important to Irish literature and have inspired some of the countryâs finest writing.
Joseph Valente has noted that âthe urban experience has indeed been comparatively underappreciated in studies of Irish literatureâ.2 Contemporary literary scholars such as Gerry Smyth have offered nuanced and important readings of Dublinâs urban literary contexts and the wider cultural significance of these. However, a broader examination of the range of Irish literary cities has yet to be completed. By virtue of their location on a small island on the periphery of Western Europe, Irish cities offer a unique urban cultural experience distinct from that of frequently fictionalised megacities such as London, Paris, and Tokyo. Understanding the cultural, social, and political mosaic that comprises Irish cities, north and south of the border, and the writing that they inspire, can open up new perspectives, not just on Irish literature, but on the broader discourse of âthe global cityâ and the city as a response to capitalist advancement and economy in flux.3
Reflected in recent, but also in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish fictions, the topography of the Irish city4 is varied and complex. According to Smyth, Joyceâs Dublin was a composite of the various layers which had contributed to the emergence of the modern city up to the late nineteenth centuryâViking trading town, colonial buttress, Georgian capital, industrial slum, and was also, in the words of Declan Kiberd âa classic example of a periphery dominated centreâ. Since then, Smyth argues, the city has continued to exist as âa complex living entity moving in time as well as in spaceâ.5 Elaborating further, Smyth argues that Dublin is not just a combination of physical and imagined environments, it is a âword cityâ,6 and the words that create it and emerge from it engender an urban narrative as fluid as the materiality of the city itself. Building on Smythâs approach to the constantly evolving âurban fabricâ of the city, we extend analysis of the living city in Irish literature to include cities outside of Dublin which have not been subjected to in-depth critical study. In these fictions, we find cities that are utopian or dystopian, and the city is habitually a liminal psycho-geographical topos; a metaphysical space which converges with the consciousness of the urbanite. Often, it is presented as a hyper-realistic metropolitan locale, forming an important site for specific social commentary on contemporary Irish culture and society.
Chris Jenks has commented that the city is âa magical placeâ, âbut the magic is not evenly distributed. So uneven is the experience of city life that it would not be vexatious to describe the idea of an urban culture as oxymoronicâ.7 This view of the city as an impossible space is problematic, and we counter this approach to the intense flux that the city presents by also considering the material qualities of the urban experience. In light of increased globalisation and connective technology, we cannot expect a homogeneous experience of the city; in fact Mark Gottdiener and Leslie Budd suggest the global city has become de-centred as a result of globalisation: â[t]he new information economy, with its accelerating use of all types of electronic telecommunications, possesses counter tendencies of de-centralisation as well as supporting the growth of new centres, including multi-cantered regional growthâ.8 Regional growth here in Ireland has encouraged the development of smaller cities and larger towns outside of the capital, each with their own unique, and culturally, globally, and economically responsive centres. These cities present the potential for new understandings of not only Irish urban experience but also global urban experience.
In the fictions of Kate OâBrien and Kevin Barry, we move beyond Dublin to encounter representations of cities on the western sea-board that respond to both global and local actualities. Huge cultural, political, economic, and colonial changes over the past 100 years have impacted how the city is experienced and as a result how it develops and evolves. Belfast, for example, is what Caroline Magennis calls a city in âtransitionâ, âhaunted by violenceâ.9 The economic boom of the Celtic Tiger also had a major impact on the topography of Ireland, urban and rural. The visual reminders of the subsequent crash remain as tens of thousands of houses still sit abandoned in ghost estates across the country. As Smyth notes, the house building boom during the first decade of the 21st Century âled to an extreme distortion of established life and work practicesâ.10 People could no longer afford to live in Dublin and commuted from towns and cities across the country, creating new urban centres, commuter towns, and a new ethno-geography. The Celtic Tiger and its aftermath had a major impact on traditional notions of âIrish national identity that obtained during the modern era suffered an extreme assault during the closing decades of the twentieth century and continuing on down to the present dayâ.11
While the changing nature of the Irish city has drawn strong creative impulse and literary response, critical attention has been drawn, in the main, to the connotations that link notions of Irish fiction to the regional and the rural. Arguably, the Irish cultural revival at the beginning of the twentieth century and nationalist legacies leading into the 1980s reinforced traditional values relating to Irish identity as cognate with rural experience. These values have resonated intensely through the range of fictions that have come to represent Irish writing since its modernist heyday. Literary greats such as John McGahern, John B. Keane, and Edna OâBrien produced some of the most unforgettable renderings of rural Catholic Ireland and these have echoed through depictions of Irish literature in English by Irish, British, and American authors alike. Oona Frawley discusses this point in her book Irish Pastoral, noting that Yeats and Synge and others involved in the revival often relied on âsophisticated urban concepts of nature [âŠ] that allowed them to engage in idealisations that led to the construction of the idea of the Irish nation as rural, traditionalâ.12 Significantly, these constructions were tied to issues over land tenure, and the political agendas of nationalism thus became bound to the city as a site at odds with romantic notions of Irishness. While Synge and other revivalists were aware of this growing dichotomy and worked to disable âthe urban/rural binary current at the timeâ, in particular pointing to the commonality of suffering in rural and urban Ireland and the importance of the shift of nationalist agitation from rural to urban settings at the turn of the twentieth century,13 Dublin continued to be rendered a zone of moral degeneracy in the broader cultural imagination and was long associated with Imperialist capitalism. Catholic anxieties about the threat posed by the capital to national purity and homogeneity are explored by experimental Irish city writers such as Flann OâBrien, who as Laura Lovejoy demonstrates in Chap. 7, begins to dismantle the contrived relationship between Irish identity, Catholicism, and the rural, expanding on the complexities of Dublin life which opened up more fluid concepts of urban life and Irishness.
âMultipli-citiesâ
Our purpose in this book is to address the city in Irish fiction as a fluid and multiple space that expands traditional notions of Irish identity as rural and challenges the view that cities are homogenous or singular. All of the chapters in this collection are guided by the common objective of re-evaluating the significance of the urban to Irish experience and exploring how the city speaks to the rapidly changing nature of Irish identity which, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, consistently responds to large-scale social, cultural, and economic shifts. The chapters form a cohesive perspective that aligns with postmodern critical approaches to cultural identity, agreeing with Jean-François Lyotard that âeclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general cultureâ,14 and thereby we address the diverse range of representations of the urban that are evident in Irish fiction. Our method allo...