Coastal Joyce

Abstract

Coastlines shape all of Joyce’s books, which are all immersed in water. Images of liquidity and fluidity are central to Joyce’s practice, while the physical and historical geography of Ireland in his works is connected together by the construction of watery links. This geography extends to the mental coordinates of the characters themselves, many of whom are linked to other places by the sea and its commerce, joins that become visible on Dublin’s quays and foreshores. This chapter situates Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the coastal curve from Howth head to Kingstown, an arc in which much of Joyce’s writing is set, Dublin an aqua city that had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, dwindled in significance to Britain’s oceanic empire.