Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama: (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Modern Irish Drama and Fiction on Screen. Barton Palmer and Marc Conner.- 1. Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer and the aesthetics of terror. Homer Pettey.- 2. Deconstructing Political Adaptations: Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Laurence Raw.- 3. Genre and Charisma in Shaw’s Major Barbara. Doug McFarland.- 4. Lewin’s Wilde:  Aestheticism, Moralism, and Hollywood. Edward Adams.- 5. ‘Wonderful and Incomparable Beauty’: Adapting Period Aesthetic for The Importance of Being Earnest. Jennifer Jenkins.- 6. The Quiet Man: From Story to Film. Michael Patrick Gillespie.- 7. The Girl with Green Eyes. R. Barton Palmer.- 8. John Huston’s ‘The Dead’. Coilin Owens.- 9. Sheridan’s Supercrip: Daniel Day-Lewis and the Wonder of My Left Foot. Tiffany Gilbert.- 10. Roddy Doyle’s The Barrytown Trilogy and Filming Ireland’s ‘New Picture’. Julieann Ulin.- 11. 1960s Popular Culture in 1960s Provincial Ireland: Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy. Michael Kissane.- 12. The Ritual of Memory in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. Marc Conner. 

About the Author :
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.