Introduction

250
Melanie Swiatloch
lowing in some detail the trajectories of car drives or long walks made by its major
characters, somewhat in the manner of James Joyce`s Ulysses” (Tigges 186). Indeed,
the reader of Eureka Street learns about many of the streets of Belfast. Already
on the second page Jake and the waitress Mary walk past Hope Street, on
the next page they pass Lisburn Road and the reader finds out that Jake is living in
Poetry Street (McLiam Wilson 2ff). Not all of the streets mentioned really exist.
However, those that are invented like Hope Street, Poetry Street, Democracy
Street or Constitution Street (ibid. 2, 3, 24, 25) opt for a positive feeling and thus
stand in contrast to the otherwise rather upsetting depictions of the city.
Frederik Tygstrup, places emphasis on the observation that the nation-state
and the novel stood in close relationship in the nineteenth century; a construction
that continued well into the twentieth century. The protagonists of those novels
thus live mainly in national capitals, which according to Tygstrup serve as “metaphorical
images” and symbolise the “head of the national organism” (Tygstrup
225). The city in the twentieth century novel on the other hand no longer serves
as a representative of the whole nation but more like an “integral universe” (ibid.
225), an area that acts rather autonomous from the nation. Accordingly the city in
the twentieth-century novel has lost the requirement of being a specific or real city
(ibid. 225). Many authors use the image of the city as an exemplary model for any
city in the world. Sometimes cities are invented to stress the universality of their
illustration even more. This new mode of writing, caused by World War I, resulted
in the feeling that not only single nations were concerned by it but the entire
world. Modernist writers therefore chose the city as setting in order to find “a
place in time” rather than a local one (ibid. 227). The scene of demolition in almost
all of Europe and other places and the feeling of forsakenness furthermore
caused them to lose the “inherited image of the city embedded in a national and
urban environment” (ibid. 227). According to Tygstrup national literature thus
morphed into world literature. “The literary world map no longer consists of nation
states, each characterized by a certain relationship between city and country,
centre and periphery, but of a system of metropolizes” (ibid. 226). He continues
by arguing that these metropolises form a closer connection among each other
than each metropolis and its national context do.
Interestingly, the novels by Caldwell, Madden and McLiam Wilson appear to
stand in the older nation-state tradition or at least in an inbetween state of the two
methods. The depiction of the city – mainly Belfast but also Derry – serves to give
a specific picture of the Troubles in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1994. It
does not describe the everyday problems of any people in any city anywhere in the
world, but focuses particularly on the life of people who were affected by the
occurrence of violence and sectarianism in a concrete period of time. City and
national context are closely linked here, and the correlation of country and city
also plays an important role.