Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama

"Surveying a century of Irish adaptations from The Informer to Dancing at Lughnasa, Palmer, Conner, and ten other contributors celebrate a national cinema whose sources range far beyond Wilde and Shaw, a cinema with the power to raise pivotal questions that have obvious application to other national cinemas as well." (Thomas M. Leitch, author of "Adaptation and its Discontents" (2007)) "This timely and highly readable collection asks why the great flowering of Irish literature, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, is strangely resistant to film adaptation and, by extension, why there is so little written about Irish literary cinema. This collection convincingly identifies and fills this gap in the field of Adaptation Studies. The collection engagingly demonstrates that it's high time we consider Irish film and literature as a group of texts that can be considered together while at the same time arguing how every example in the volume - from adaptations of the works of George Bernard Shaw to those of Roddy Doyle - invites and resists a monolithic notion of Irish literary cinema." (Deborah Cartmell, author of "A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation" (2012)) "The imaginative vibrancy of Irish cinema receives its rightful due in this critically shrewd, reliably witty and historically nuanced survey of film adaptations. Indispensable for anyone curious about or fascinated by how modern Irish drama and fiction have been translated to the screen." (Maria DiBattista, author of "Fast-talking Dames" (2001))

This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Modern Irish Literature and the Irish cinema, with twelve chapters written by experts in the field that deal with principal films, authors, and directors.This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Modern Irish Literature and the Irish cinema, with twelve chapters written by experts in the field that deal with principal films, authors, and directors. This survey outlines the influence of screen adaptation of important texts from the national literature on the construction of an Irish cinema, many of whose films because of cultural constraints were produced and exhibited outside the country until very recently. Authors discussed include George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Liam O’Flaherty, Christy Brown, Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, and Brian Friel. The films analysed in this volume include THE QUIET MAN, THE INFORMER, MAJOR BARBARA, THE GIRL WITH GREEN EYES, MY LEFT FOOT, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, THE SNAPPER, and DANCING AT LUGHNASA. The introduction features a detailed discussion of the cultural and political questions raised by the promotion of forms of national identity by Ireland’s literary and cinematic establishments.