James Joyce once told one of his friends, "I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world". These words give expression to the characteristics of Irish writers' literary productions, especially those who represented themselves as self-exiles and spent most of their lives outside their home country as Joyce did. Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet and a Nobel Prize winner in 1997, said "Joyce is now a world presence as well as a witness from the periphery", and he suggested that Irish writers represented by Joyce had intended to situate themselves, their writings and their Irish experiences at the very centre of the universe so that their homeland might become the defining centre from which an entirely new reading could be conducted. This paper explores the tracks of Joyce's and Heaney's literary activities which proceeded from the peripheral to the universal.