What happens when we read the Irish literary canon for energy? We find numerous mentions of wind power, solar power, petrol, coal, peat, gas, and dung, and we find these energy resources and infrastructures trellised into plot lines and character arcs in some unexpected ways in Irish literature, from Joyce and Beckett to Heaney and McCormack. What emerges is a partial but suggestive cognitive map – of Irish energy economies, ecologies, and phenomenologies – that reveals Ireland’s unique energy signature and at the same time links Ireland to other imperial and global regimes of petromodernity.

As Stephen Dedalus walks upon Sandymount Strand in Ulysses, he thinks, “the land a maze of dark cunning nets … Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersman and master mariners. Human shells” (3.154–57). This thought evokes Ireland’s complicated position as an island nation and its entanglements with fellow colonized peoples. For Ireland’s cultural mariners of the twentieth century, navigating such currents requires a knowledge not only of sea but also of sky. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, a chapter where the city of Dublin is the prominent star, the sections are separated by a series of three asterisks also known as a dinkus. As a writer for the Paris Review explains, a dinkus is “used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars.” Asterisms serve as a striking intervention into the textual groundswells of Joyce’s Ulysses that ultimately connect to Derek Walcott’s own navigations in Omeros as a means of paternal inheritance and transatlantic affiliation.

Dublin: A Writer’s City begins with a personal introduction, in which the author reflects on his arrival in the city in the mid-1980s, and his realization during his very first hours there that he was living a few doors down from where Oscar Wilde had been born, on a street that features in Ulysses, in the stories of Samuel Beckett, and in the poetry of Thomas Kinsella – and around the corner from the site of the first production of what would become the Abbey Theatre. This initial stroll down an apparently innocuous street – Westland Row – provides the basis for a reflection on the ways in which being aware of the literature of a city influence our experience of urban living. These reflections are framed in the context of the empty city during the pandemic that began in the spring of 2020.

More than a century on, the modern history of Dublin continues to be dominated by the Easter Rising of 1916. Although the Rising took place all over the city, its focal point was the General Post Office, on O’Connell Street. This chapter takes as its keynote a paradox that emerges in the literature of O’Connell Street. On the one hand, it is here that a rebellion led by poets and playwrights has produced a site with a solemn historical memory attached to it. At the same time, the street itself has long had a carnivalesque quality, made possible by its original design as a place in which fashionable citizens could promenade, and continuing today. This tension emerges in major works by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Seán O’Casey, and W. B. Yeats, as well as by more recent writers, including Roddy Doyle. The sense of paradox is heightened by the proximity of the Abbey Theatre, on the adjacent Abbey Street. Here, a living theatre culture carries on a tradition begun by Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, contributing to the distinctive character of this part of the city as a kind unruly ceremonial centre.

Dublin’s origins as a city are Viking, and the buried remains of this era can be found near the site of Christchurch Cathedral, where the now covered-over River Poddle ran down to the Liffey. It was here that the original medieval city grew up around the administrative centre of Dublin Castle, adjacent to which the city’s first theatres in the seventeenth century – notably Smock Alley – would be built. This chapter takes as its keynote the idea of a buried past making itself felt in the present in literature.This extends from contemporary crime fiction by Tanya French and classic nineteenth-century gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, to poetry and theatre about the Northern Ireland conflict by Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel that finds a metaphor in the Viking past. This part of the city is also dominated by the figure of Jonathan Swift, whose response to the poverty he saw around him is echoed in later writers. It is also the part of the city most closely associated with the poet James Clarence Mangan, who in turn haunts James Joyce’s classic short story, ‘The Dead’, which is set in this part of the city.

If James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake, can be said to be set anywhere, it is in a pub in Chapelizod, in the west of Dublin along the River Liffey, beside the Phoenix Park, which marks the city’s historical western boundary. This had already been the location for gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu in the nineteenth century, and the poet Thomas Kinsella would often return in his writing to the area around the Park, and nearby Inchicore, where he grew up. However, before any of these writers, the Phoenix Park itself developed a literature of its own in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was a place for promenading and for duelling. Today, the contrast between past and present is sharper in this part of the city than perhaps anywhere else. With the rapid geographical spread of Dublin since the middle of the twentieth century, new suburbs have spread far beyond the original western bounds of the city, extending into neighbouring counties. It is here that the challenge of finding literary forms adequate to the life of its citizens is felt most strongly in a city that has long defined itself as a writer’s city.

Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is a narrative reenactment of a poetic reenactment of the historical avant-gardes: a novel from the 1990s that combines modernist and avant-garde narrative techniques to revisit an experimental poetic group from the 1970s as they reprise and research and recover practices and figures from the 1920s to their present. At the same time that its protagonists investigate forgotten works from the past, they also form a community that generates work in the present tense (“poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry”, as Bolaño put it in a 1976 manifesto), that aims to interrupt the generation of what they see as unproductive forms and practices (incarnated in Octavio Paz and the peasant poets), and that reaches out to a broader international horizon of experimental poetics, primarily Peru and France but also alluding to North American, Argentinean, and Chilean experiments. This article elucidates and unpacks the novel’s handling of these various legacies and affiliations, while also underlining how it points, elliptically but continuously, to what is left out of the record of even the most encompassing histories of the avant-gardes: their female artists, whose legacy here flares up before flowing into the expanded monologue of Amulet.

The chapter provides an overview of literary predecessors whose influence is evident across Mailer’s work, but perhaps most notably in his early work: John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

Stoppard engages with the legacy of the historical avant-garde throughout his writing; literary history energises and informs his theatre. It is modernism, though, that paves the way for Stoppard’s view of the artist as one who reorganises material into meaning. In Travesties, Stoppard uses Joyce to reaffirm the modernist tenet that authorial labour produces texts worth attending, events worth staging, and fictions that revise fictions.

“Crowd Involvements and Attachments,” analyzes and classifies group affect and other forms of thinking together, such as Heraclitean flows of group thought, sensation, and experience made available through new structures of collective feeling. The chapter counters arguments about the role of the leader with the proposition that the crowd may behave as an assemblage governed by an attractor, figured by characters such as James Wait, aboard the Narcissus, or Stevie in The Secret Agent. The function of Bloom for the crowd in “Cyclops” speaks to the crowd’s management of its anxieties and their effects. The chapter explores the interpenetration of public and private spaces in Sean O’Casey’s plays to understand crowds’ precise attachments to and exercise of design over the histories and semiotics of the metropolis, testing whether and in what manner they gain the sense of a shared life and act as a performative mass body.

"Compositions of the Crowds of Modernism" gives a preliminary assessment of modernist crowds’ of-what and with-what, that is, the experimental taxonomies and relations of collective life as composed in fiction by writers such as Conrad, Woolf, and H.G. Wells. The chapter describes some of the terrains and territories of modern crowds, including the structures and political ecologies within which mass societies were forming and to which modernist literatures respond. It enlists concepts such as equal relations, virtuality, and crowd symbols to understand the twentieth century’s disruptive struggles over inherited and established identities such as nation, gender, class, or race.

Chapter Three, “Crowds and Transformation,” synthesizes concepts of self-recovery, play, and collective intellect to explore what transformative tools and practices crowds were developing (in modernist fictional worlds) in order to identify and represent themselves, or to have as tactical weapons during their conflicts with elite authority. Conventional identity is creatively reworked by disarticulated performances such as Clarissa’s or the unnamed Captain in The Secret Sharer. The chapter maps mechanisms that produce modernity’s porous and transmissible social mind, exemplified in readings of Jacob’s Room and “Ithaca,” for example. Historical examples of street demonstrations and popular movements in the first decades of the twentieth century in England and Ireland are compared with readings of the permeable and suggestible crowds of “Wandering Rocks” and Wyndham Lewis’ writings, to differentiate what the book identifies as rising crowds from Lewis’ crowds of “extinction.” Finally, the chapter transitions to the concept of crowdedness as an ethical experience.

In Chapter Four, “Crowds and Agility,” the project turns to the fully imagined agile movement and potential virtuosity of modernist crowds, their reworked vocabularies across, and between media, their effectiveness in turning situations to advantage, and their conflictual relations with federating powers, established inequities, and inherited elitisms. In order to demonstrate the full scope of potentials involved, the chapter opens up to range more widely across a variety of media, aesthetics, and categories of works within modernism that simultaneously contribute to contriving a social space and interfering with its undemocratic spectacularization. In its most fully realized form, the modernist agile crowd claims to be unclassifiable within previous categories of social fields, and insists on a fundamental heterogeneity at the level of demand and composition.

This chapter follows on from the last to trace the development of the prosthetic modernism discernible at the turn of the twentieth century, as it works through the modernist novel from Proust, Joyce, Stein and Woolf up to the extended late modernist work of Samuel Beckett. The chapter reads Beckett’s reception of Proustian and Joycean modernism, from his novels of the thirties and forties up to his late work Company and suggests that this reception might best be understood as a poetics of twining. Beckett offers an extended reflection on the ways in which the modernist novel performs a mode of twining, a joining together of mind with prosthetic extension; but he also enacts a specific form of untwining, which demonstrates how the novel has always shown the unbound, the disaggregated, to be a constituent part of the terms in which it conducts its binding properties.

The chapter finds in Ulysses the logical end to Loyola’s project. It is Joyce’s most radical experiment thus far in creating his own ‘exercise’, his own set of impossible demands on the reader. It closely reads a particularly overloaded passage from the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses, a particular structure of paranoid frustration that Joyce has worked on before but one that here entails a most unstable position from the reader in the quest for that ‘sincere irony’ Loyola and Joyce demand.

The chapter finds in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ a radical problematization of idiolect, one that creates a specific form of unstable narrative practice. It finds within these problematics a demand for what will be called the Loyolan Position: a mental stance towards the crises both Loyola and Joyce mobilize. The chapter is marked by a fresh, sustained close reading of one of the most well-read and well-analysed stories in English.

The chapter examines A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through the theory elaborated thus far. It reads Father Arnall’s sermon, Stephen’s account in the anatomy theatre, and Davin’s story from the Ballyhoura Hills as Joyce’s deepening and increasingly complex work on the challenges of the Loyolan Posiiton. These readings move towards a new understanding of the strange narrative apparatus of Portrait, an understanding rooted in both Loyola’s theology and Klein’s psychoanalysis.

The conclusion surveys the arguments made, leading to a new theory of readerly transference.