No Mean City?: The Image of Dublin in the Novels of Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, and Val Mulkerns

Over the last ten to fifteen years there has been a renewed interest in Dublin as a literary setting. At the centre of this study is an analysis of four novels by three contemporary Dublin writers (Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle and Val Mulkerns) with regard to the way the artists make use of the city both as a setting and a theme of their novels, thereby projecting their image of the city. The aim is to show that although all the novels share the same setting, it is no standardized image of Dublin that emerges but each novel focusses on a different aspect of life in the city which, taken all together, complement each other.