The prick with the stick and the city that hated then loved him : James Joyce, the city of Dublin, and the imagined tourist experience

Abstract

James Joyce's novel Ulysses depicts the Dublin of 1904 in such detail that Joyce was famously quoted as saying that "if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book," and it is this city of fiction which literary tourists come to experience in Dublin today. The phenomenon of the imaginary becoming heritage is unique to the literary tourist experience, and it is one that keeps the modern city of Dublin situated in the nostalgic past. Joyce harbored ambivalent feelings in his lifetime towards the city of his birth, and Dublin reciprocated until recent decades; now it embraces and exploits its most famous son. I examine the history of the complicated relationship between Joyce and Dublin as it plays out through the complex systems of literary tourism, ultimately exploring the opposing academic and non-academic enthusiast communities occurring within the city of Dublin today.