What happens when we read the Irish literary canon for energy? We find numerous mentions of wind power, solar power, petrol, coal, peat, gas, and dung, and we find these energy resources and infrastructures trellised into plot lines and character arcs in some unexpected ways in Irish literature, from Joyce and Beckett to Heaney and McCormack. What emerges is a partial but suggestive cognitive map – of Irish energy economies, ecologies, and phenomenologies – that reveals Ireland’s unique energy signature and at the same time links Ireland to other imperial and global regimes of petromodernity.

Sometimes, a geographical feature can stamp itself on the character of a place. In the case of the south coast of Dublin, the expanse of sea and sky has led more than one writer to ask – in more than one way – “am I walking into eternity on Sandymount Strand?” (as Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses). It was here that the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney lived and wrote for many years, just down the coast from the Martello tower that features in Ulysses. A little further along the coast again is the pier at Dún Laoghaire, associated with a pivotal passage in Samuel Beckett’s work. Even as it looks outwards, however, Dublin’s south coast has a long association with wealth and privilege, from the secluded villas of the eighteenth century to the property boom of the early twenty-first century. This is reflected in work extending from Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee to contemporary fiction by Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, and the satire of Paul Howard, and the number of contemporary Dublin crime novels associated with the area.