Dublin is a complex, multi-faceted city-region which has in turn generated
a complex, multi-faceted culture traversing a wide array of genres and
narratives. Literary Dublin is widely known and celebrated; but the popular
arts – cinema and music, for example – are likewise implicated in the
imaginative representation of the city. Of these, the latter possesses an
especially rich genealogy: a reservoir of images and associations accumulated
over an extended period of time, itself based on an older ballad tradition
in which the city functioned as an imaginative spatial resource for
a diverse array of discourses (class, gender, nation, community, profession,
etc.). Given the city’s continuing centrality to the economic, cultural
and political organisation of Ireland as a whole, it is likely that Dublin’s
significance will only grow as the country endeavours to come to terms
with the extinction of the Celtic Tiger.
