* Lucid and accessible style makes the series appealing to the general reader

* Liberally illustrated throughout with stills from the film under discussion

* Collaboration between Cork University Press and the Film Institute of Ireland.



-The Butcher Boy- is perhaps the finest film to have come out of Ireland. Although it breaks clearly with the banal canons of realism, it is nonetheless the most realistic of Irish films. It engages with the society and culture of modern Ireland with a wit and ferocity that denies the viewer any easy moral position. Cinema...

John Ford's -The Quiet Man- (1952) is the most popular cinematic representation of Ireland, and one of Hollywood's classic romantic comedies. For some viewers and critics the film is a powerful evocation of romantic Ireland and the search for home; for others, it is a showcase for the worst stereotypes of stage-Irishry. Much of Irish cinema since the development of an indigenous film industry in the 1980s has set its face firmly against these mythic images of Ireland, but no film has yet attained the enduring appeal of -The Quiet Man-. In this radical reappraisal of Ford's Oscar-winning film,...

Liam O'Flaherty's novel The Informer (1925) is what the author of this fascinating study calls a -mythogenic text- - one that lends itself easily to adaptations, recreations and renditions. To date there have been four film versions (Arthur Robison 1929, John Ford 1935, Jules Dassin 1968, Michael Byrne 1992) and at least as many stage versions. One of the reasons the novel has proved so attractive to filmmakers is that it was itself written with an eye on the silent expressionist cinema of the day. All too often O'Flaherty has been regarded as a hard realist who drew the great vigor of his...

This Other Eden (1959) was one of the first films produced by Emmet Dalton in the newly formed Ardmore Studios, and was the first Irish feature film to be directed by a woman, Muriel Box. The film explores the traumatic legacy of the Civil War, and in particular the impact of the death of Michael Collins on successive generations. Given that Emmet Dalton was with Collins the day he was shot, some critics have speculated that this film was an attempt to redress, even rewrite the history of that time. However, like the Louis D'Alton play on which it is based, This Other Eden is not just a...

Pat Murphy's third feature film, Nora (2000), is based on Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography of Nora Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce. The film is on one level a sumptuous historical romance, on another a feminist biopic, on yet another a complex meditation on the relationship between high modernist art and ordinary human relationships. It challenges the ways in which history and sexuality have been constructed in Irish film throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Both the literary biography and film of Nora explore the nature of sexual and aesthetic freedom. But whereas Maddox's biography illuminated...

John B. Keane's popular play -The Field- (1965), based on a boundary dispute and murder in County Kerry, inspired the 1990 film scripted and directed by Jim Sheridan. Both works address the impact of dislocating social change on agricultural communities while insisting on darker power struggles within traditional life. To Keane's acute portrayal of the mid-century dismantling of rural society, Sheridan adds not only his characteristic attention to the varieties of social injustice spawned by modernization, but also liberal allusions to Irish myth, literature, and cinema. Drawing on fresh...

Margot Norris discusses the challenges that Ulysses, one of the greatest and most difficult novels of the twentieth century, posed to the filmmaker, along with the production and censorship problems that Strick encountered before the film was released to great contemporary critical acclaim.

James Joyce, interested in drama from his youth, encountered early Italian cinema in Trieste and subsequently worked to establish the first movie-house in Dublin in 1909. He eventually discussed his cinematographic writing techniques with the great Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein. But...

* Lucid and accessible style makes the series appealing to the general reader
* Liberally illustrated throughout with stills from the film under discussion.
* Collaboration between Cork University Press and the Film Institute of Ireland.

Between the premiere of Brian Friel's stage play "Dancing at Lughnasa" in 1990 and Pat O'Connor's cinematic adaptation in 1998, Ireland experienced seismic economic and social changes, as well as "Riverdance," "Angela's Ashes" and an international vogue for all things Irish. Set in 1936, "Dancing at Lughnasa," as both film and play, imagines an...

Felicia's Journey explores the 1999 film adaptation by Director Atom Egoyan of William Trevor's novel of 1994. McBride addresses Hitchcockian influences, the sense of place in the visual discourse, and the characterization of the serial killer Hilditch, as constructed initially by Trevor and interpreted by Egoyan. Eschewing a crude -fidelity- model of adaptation, the study explores Egoyan's screen version as a commentary on, or significant reworking of, the original book. In particular, Egoyan's extension of the mother figure, through his creation of Gala, opens questions about memory,...

The publication of The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van signaled the emergence of a significant new voice in Irish fiction. The significance lay not only in the description of a particular milieu and the social reality evoked, but more particularly in the form of writing used to portray the lives of the fictional Barrytown characters. The book explores the dialectical relationship between the world of the Barrytown characters as mediated through filmed and televised experiences and the translation of these experiences into the film medium in Parker's and Frears' work....