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

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, Irelands 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 nations growth pains and travails. Whereas Irish literature had long stood as the nations foremost artistic achievement, it is not too much to say that film now rivals literature as Irelands key form of cultural expression. The proliferation of successful 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. 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. R. Barton Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature emeritus at Clemson University, USA, where he taught from 1995-2019 Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction Works Cited Chapter 2: Filming Global Ireland: Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments Works Cited Chapter 3: The Riddle of the Models of John Carney’s Sing Street (2016) Works Cited Chapter 4: The Women Incarnate of Words Upon the Window Pane Works Cited Chapter 5: Mouth Not Eye: On Jordan’s Adaptation of Beckett’s Not I Works Cited Chapter 6: “The Joyce of Filum: Cinematic Accounts of Ulysses” Works Cited Chapter 7: “One Beetle Recognizes Another”: Translation, Transformation, Transgression in Cartoon Saloon’s Film The Secret of Kells Works Cited Chapter 8: Bad Da’s: Rewriting Fatherhood in Breakfast on Pluto Works Cited Chapter 9: What Richard Did: Sort of Adapting Irish History (Un) Screening the National Production, Auteur, History Works Cited Chapter 10: Plagues of Silence: Adaptation and Agency in Colm Tóibín’s and John Crowley’s Brooklyns Works Cited Chapter 11: The Program, Seven Deadly Sins, and Stephen Frears Chapter 12: The Immutable and Un-retrievable in the Diasporic Films of John Michael and Martin McDonagh Introduction The Second Death: Last Rites Six Shooter: “Against God” In Bruges: Rendering and Surrendering The Guard: Provisional Erasures Seven Psychopaths: Serial Narrators Calvary: Patriarchal Purification Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri: Crips and Bloods Conclusion Works Cited Chapter 13: “How should we remember what happened?”: Cultural Representations of Institutional Abuse in Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scripture Introduction Sheridan’s Scripture Enforced Happiness Alternative Approaches Refusing Happiness Works Cited Index