This Other Eden [Paperback]

This Other Eden (1959) was one of the first films produced by Emmet Dalton in the newly formed Ardmore Studios, and was the first Irish feature film to be directed by a woman, Muriel Box. The film explores the traumatic legacy of the Civil War, and in particular the impact of the death of Michael Collins on successive generations. Given that Emmet Dalton was with Collins the day he was shot, some critics have speculated that this film was an attempt to redress, even rewrite the history of that time. However, like the Louis D'Alton play on which it is based, This Other Eden is not just a critique of the past but a witty and complex satire of an emergent modern Ireland in the late 1950s. Fidelma Farley traces the genealogy of the text from Shaw's John Bull's Other Island to D'Alton's Abbey play and Box's film. Using unpublished archival material (including Muriel Box's personal diaries), Farley reclaims this little-known Irish classic by firmly rooting it in the cultural context of the Lemass era.This title has been reviewed jointly with This Other Eden, by Fidelma Farley, and December Bride, by Lance Pettitt.

These three concise monographs initiate a collaboration between Cork University and the Irish Film Institute and a series titled Ireland into Film. In his brilliant study of John Huston's last film (1987), an adaptation of James Joyce's last short story, The Dead (1907), Barry analyzes the film's tripartite structure of repetition and variation, the serenity that derives from its mix of apprehension and irresolution, and both its fidelity to and its strong misreading of the Joyce source. Barry attributes four major changes to the unforeseen Irish national narrative of independence, the development of the Hollywood classic style, Huston's own auteurship, and the advent of Joyce criticism--that is, Huston's changes sensitively adjust to the intervening history and the shift in medium.

Though the other two volumes folă