Dublin: A Writer’s City

In this vivid ode to Irish literature, Morash (Yeats on Theatre), a professor of Irish writing at Trinity College Dublin, takes readers on a literary tour. “Truly experiencing Dublin means being able to read the city’s collective memory in its streets and buildings; and having access to that memory from the inside means knowing the city’s literature,” Morash posits, homing in on how such locales as St. Stephen’s Green, Trinity College, and the Abbey Theatre have featured in the works and lives of famous writers. He starts his tour by recounting his first lodgings in the city as a grad student in 1985, when he lived down the street from Oscar Wilde’s birthplace on Westland Row. Morash’s perambulations take him to the city’s south coast, where poet Seamus Heaney lived and James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus ruminated on the “ineluctable modality of the visible” in Ulysses, as well as Baggotonia, the name given to the area around Baggot Street that hosted a mid-20th-century literary scene frequented by writers Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and Flann O’Brien. The walking tour format makes for a creative introduction to Irish writers, and those already familiar with the authors will come away with a fuller understanding of the locales that shaped them. The result is a fitting tribute to the rich literary history of Dublin. Photos. (Mar.)