Dublin in the Rare New Times
D. Hand
Oct 15, 2020
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Semantic Scholar
Key Takeaway Key Takeaway: Novelists' responses to the globalization-influenced changes in Dublin reveal a fluid and mobile city identity, posing unsettling questions about self and community.
Abstract
This chapter examines novelistic responses to the multifaceted changes that characterized life in Dublin during and after the Celtic Tiger era. The first part explores portrayals of changing personal, moral, and artistic value systems at a time when the forces of globalization were altering the city’s distinctive culture. This is followed by a consideration of the treatment of history in some recent Dublin-set novels, with particular focus on works that explore the interplay between previous eras and the present one, including the legacies of hidden trauma. In examining novelists’ attempts to identify what it is that defines Dubliners and their city in the era of globalization, the chapter finds that while the answers vary from novelist to novelist, all understand the city’s identity to be fluid and mobile, a complex amalgam of local and global elements that poses unsettling questions about the meaning and constitution of self and community.