Let’s begin with a new idea: in truth, the place most obsessively attended to in James Joyce’s writing is not Dublin. Until now, it has been a critical truism that Joyce’s artistic agenda was in part to put Dublin, a backwater that had once, as he noted, been the second city of the British Empire, on the global artistic map. Joyce himself, in naming his story collection Dubliners, and in oft-cited letters to his would-be publisher William Heinemann and to his brother Stanislaus in 1905, spoke of ‘stories of public life in Dublin.