Dublin

Architecture and modern literature

“…The scheme was discouraged by his steward, Thomas Golding, who reminded him of his "great and continual wants" while observing that "this part of the country is not pleasant nor sportely" and therefore not likely to attract royal hunters . 10 Like the poem, the architecture of the house itself represents an imaginary relation to its own history. The crenellated towers, for example, call up images of the chivalric Middle Ages, whereas they were added in the mid-sixteenth century when such forti‹cations were no longer needed; they are thus merely "decorative and deliberately anachronistic" (Wayne 101).…”

“…Given Joyce's almost medieval attention to secret symmetries, it can hardly be an accident that precisely midway through this middle chapter, in the eighth of sixteen sections, we are introduced to "the most historic spot in all Dublin" (10:409), the chapter house of Saint Mary's Abbey on the north bank of the Liffey, founded in 1139 as a monastery of the reformed Savigniac order of the Benedictines and absorbed in 1147 into the Cistercian order. 10 The architectural historian Christine Casey notes the "subterranean grandeur" of the place, which she considers "the most evocative medieval building in the city of Dublin" (86). Among the events it evokes is that in which Thomas Fitzgerald, vice deputy governor of Ireland and known as "Silken Thomas," declared himself a rebel to King Henry VIII in 1534 and launched an unsuccessful attack on Dublin Castle with his small force of rebels.…”

Architecture and Modern Literature

“…As in the later sonnet on "Mutability," the historical memory and material remains of monastic dissolution provide an allegorical frame for the poet's personal history of spiritual loss and transformation. 10 ii. ruskin: the ethical turn Our reading of the Gothic motif in Wordsworth and Goethe has proceeded along two main axes.…”

“…The sensation of the uneven paving stones occasions a sudden feeling of pure joy, which he is unable to account for until he remembers that, years before, he felt precisely the same sensation while treading the uneven tiles of the baptistery of Saint Mark's, so that the present moment brings back the feelings of happiness he felt at that moment in that place. 10 But the narrator is not content merely to register this sensation, because it seems to point the way toward a solution to the otherwise irretrievable difference between past and present, absence and presence, matter and memory, and even being and meaning. He wants to know how the "image" of the past, so fortuitously if only momentarily recovered, gives him a joy "pareille à une certitude" (akin to a certainty) and in itself enough to make him indifferent to death (4:446).…”