Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction: Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama

   • R. Barton Palmer, Marc C. Conner

   Pages 1-25

3. Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer and the Aesthetics of Terror

   • Homer B. Pettey

   Pages 27-53

4. Deconstructing Political Adaptations: Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars

   • Laurence Raw

   Pages 55-72

5. Genre and Charisma in Shaw’s Major Barbara

   • Douglas McFarland

   Pages 73-88

6. Lewin’s Wilde: Aestheticism, Moralism, and Hollywood

   • Edward Adams

   Pages 89-102

7. “Wonderful and Incomparable Beauty”: Adapting Period Aesthetic for The Importance of Being Earnest

   • Jennifer L. Jenkins

   Pages 103-120

8. The Quiet Man: From Story to Film

   • Michael Patrick Gillespie

   Pages 121-135

9. The British New Wave Screens Ireland: Desmond Davis’s The Girl with Green Eyes (1964)

   • R. Barton Palmer

   Pages 137-156

10. John Huston’s The Dead (1987)

    • Cóilín Owens

    Pages 157-171

11. Sheridan’s Supercrip: Daniel Day-Lewis and the Wonder of My Left Foot (1989)

    • Tiffany Gilbert

    Pages 173-190

12. Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy and Filming Ireland’s “New Picture”

    • Julieann Veronica Ulin

    Pages 191-211

13. Popular Culture in 1960s Provincial Ireland: Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy

    • Michael Kissane

    Pages 213-229

14. The Ritual of Memory in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa

    • Marc C. Conner

    Pages 231-250

15. Back Matter

    Pages 251-264

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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 andcinematic establishments.



 

• Adaptation
• Visual culture
• Irish fiction
• Irish drama
• Ireland
• Theatre
• Oscar Wilde
• Roddy Doyle
• Patrick McCabe
• George Bernard Shaw
• Irish literature
• Irish film
• Irish culture
• Irish cinema
• National cinema
• National literature
• British and Irish Literature

“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))

• Clemson University , Atlanta, USA

  R. Barton Palmer

• Washington and Lee University , Lexington, USA

  Marc C. Conner

R. Barton Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the World Cinema program. He is the author, editor, or general editor of more than seventy academic books in both literature and film studies. He directs book series at six university or scholarly presses, including (with Julie Grossman) Adaptation and Visual Culture at Palgrave Macmillan. He is the author or editor of several books on literature/film adaptation, including (with Grossman) the multi-author volume Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

Marc C. Conner is the Jo M. and James M. Ballengee Professor of English and Interim Provost at Washington and Lee. His books include The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable (2000), Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher (2007), The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered (2012), and The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century, forthcoming (2016). In 2012 the Great Courses program released his 24-lecture series titled How to Read and Understand Shakespeare, and in 2016 they will release a 36-lecture series titled The Irish Identity: Independence, History, and Literature.

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