Growing up in Dublin, I always passed statues and street names without thinking too much about them. Now that I’m in my first year of college, when talking with friends in English courses it’s so interesting to see what they are studying and all their texts from writers in the city where it all happened, it feels different.
Writers like Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Paula Meehan don’t just feel like names in textbooks anymore , they feel connected to the streets I know.
Oscar Wilde is probably the most dazzling of them. Born in Dublin in 1854, he became famous for his wit, his plays, and his sharp criticism of Victorian society. When we studied The Picture of Dorian Grey, I was struck by how boldly he challenged ideas about morality and respectability.
Wilde exposed the hypocrisy of a society that pretended to be pure while hiding its own corruption. From a modern perspective, especially as young people in Ireland today, we read Wilde through queer theory and discussions about identity and freedom.
Knowing how he was imprisoned for his sexuality makes his work feel braver. Dublin now celebrates him with a statue in Merrion Square, but in his lifetime, he was cast out. That contrast says a lot about how the social context of the city (and the country ) has changed.
James Joyce feels more complicated but maybe even more powerful. Dubliners presents a city stuck in “paralysis,” shaped by religion, colonial history, and rigid social structures. He didn’t romanticise Dublin; he showed its frustrations and limitations.
Then in Ulysses, he transformed one ordinary day in Dublin into something epic. What amazes me is how detailed it is, the pubs, the streets, the conversations.
As college students, we approach Joyce with modern critical lenses like postcolonialism and feminism. We question how British rule influenced Irish identity. We look closely at characters like Molly Bloom and discuss female voice and agency in ways earlier generations might not have.
Joyce may have left Dublin physically, but he preserved it in literature so completely that every year on Bloomsday the city still revolves around him.
Paula Meehan feels closest to my own generation. Her poetry captures inner-city Dublin, family life, women’s experiences, and social struggle with honesty and lyricism.
In collections like The Man Who Was Marked by Winter, she writes about real lives in a way that feels immediate and recognisable.
In class, we discuss her work through feminist and socio-economic perspectives, exploring how she gives voice to communities that were often overlooked in earlier Irish literature. She shows a Dublin that isn’t polished or tourist-friendly, but layered and real.
What connects all three writers is how deeply they are engaged with the social context of Dublin. Wilde challenged moral hypocrisy. Joyce dissected political and cultural paralysis.
Meehan highlights class, gender, and survival in a modern city. Each of them reflects Dublin at a particular moment in history, but they also shape how we understand it now.
As a first-year student, sometimes I feel slightly out of place in academic spaces, like I’m still figuring out where I belong. But reading these writers through a modern lens makes literature feel alive and relevant.
They remind us that Dublin has always been a city of contradictions, beauty and hardship, tradition and rebellion, silence and expression.
Their lasting impression isn’t just in exams or essays. It’s in how they’ve influenced the way we think about identity, equality, and whose stories deserve to be told.
Studying them now, in the same city that formed them, makes me realise that Dublin isn’t just the background of their work, it’s a living, changing character. And as students, we’re part of that ongoing story.