The emergence of modern Dublin: reality and representation

This paper challenges the predominant reading of Dublin's architectural history whereby the eighteenth century is a golden age of rational urbanism and the nineteenth century represents a collapse into confusion and stasis. It emphasises the different ways in which the city continued to change in the nineteenth century. An examination of James Joyce's changing representation of Dublin - from the ‘scrupulous meanness’ ofDublinersto the exuberance ofUlysses- suggests how an equivalent shift in architectural strategies, from a nostalgia for the formal certainties of Georgian Dublin towards an appreciation of the heterogeneous nineteenth-century city, might produce a new kind of urbanism.