* 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,...

* 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...