Screening Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama, 1st ed. 2022 Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture Series

In this book, each chapter explores significant Irish texts in their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. With an introduction that establishes the multiple critical contexts for Irish cinema, literature, and their adaptive textual worlds, the volume addresses some of the most popular and important late 20th-Century and 21st Century works that have had an impact on the Irish and global cinema and literary landscape. A remarkable series of acclaimed and profitable domestic productions during the past three decades has accompanied, while chronicling, Ireland?s struggle with self-identity, national consciousness, and cultural expression, such that the story of contemporary Irish cinema is in many ways the story of the young nation?s growth pains and travails. Whereas Irish literature had long stood as the nation?s foremost artistic achievement, it is not too much to say that film now rivals literature as Ireland?s key form of cultural expression. The proliferation ofsuccessful screen versionings of Irish fiction and drama shows how intimately the contemporary Irish cinema is tied to the project of both understanding and complicating (even denying) a national identity that has undergone radical change during the past three decades. This present volume is the first to present a collective accounting of that productive synergy, which has seen so much of contemporary Irish literature transferred to the screen.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Filming Global Ireland: Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments.- Chapter 3: The Riddle of the Models of John Carney’s Sing Street (2016).- Chapter 4:  The Women Incarnate of Words Upon the Window Pane.- Chapter 5: Mouth Not Eye: Neil Jordan’s Adaptation of Beckett’s Not I.- Chapter 6: Re: Imagining Ulysses.- Chapter 7:  One Beetle Recognizes Another: translation, transformation, transgression in Cartoon Saloon’s film The Secret of Kells.- Chapter 8: Bad Da’s: Rewriting Fatherhood in Breakfast on Pluto.- Chapter 9: What Richard Did: Sort of Adapting Irish History.- Chapter 10: Plagues of Silence: Adaptation and Agency in Colm Tóibín’s and John Crowley’s Brooklyns.- Chapter 11: The Program, Seven Deadly Sins, and Stephen Frears.- Chapter 12: An Un-retrieval Sacrificial/Penitent Sensibility in the Diasporic Films of John Michael and Martin McDonagh.- Chapter 13: ’How should we remember what happened?’: Cultural Representations of Institutional Abuse in Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scripture.

Marc C. Conner is the President of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, USA, where he is also professor of English.

Julie Grossman is Professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College, USA.