Fictional journeys: paper landscapes, tourist trails and Dublin's literary texts

Abstract

Recent geographical analyses of literary texts have broadened the scope of inquiry from descriptive to critical interpretations of literature. Building on these existing insights in this paper I seek to focus on James Joyce's Dublin. Specifically, I wish to address how the navigational matrix presented in his novels provides a means for interpreting the city. This paper focuses on how the Dublin of Joyce intersects with travel accounts about Ireland and the city in particular and how his novels can be used to engage with the complex geographies of the modern city. While global cities like London, Paris and New York have well‐established credentials as centres of literary creativity and literary tourism, the fact that Dublin forms the anchor for one of the twentieth century's most experimental writers makes it an interesting case from which to address the geographies of the novel.

Keywords:

• fictive geographies
• literary tourism
• James Joyce
• Dublin