Dancing at Lughnasa

* Lucid and accessible style makes the series appealing to the general reader
* Liberally illustrated throughout with stills from the film under discussion.
* Collaboration between Cork University Press and the Film Institute of Ireland.

Between the première of Brian Friel’s stage play "Dancing at Lughnasa" in 1990 and Pat O’Connor’s cinematic adaptation in 1998, Ireland experienced seismic economic and social changes, as well as "Riverdance", "Angela’s Ashes" and an international vogue for all things Irish. Set in 1936, "Dancing at Lughnasa", as both film and play, imagines an anachronistic past in which the loss of joyous communal ritual is symptomatic of the cultural malaise so often associated with Ireland in the 1930s. Drawing upon unpublished material from the Friel archive at the National Library of Ireland, Joan FitzPatrick Dean contrasts the expressly theatrical elements of Friel’s play and their cinematic counterparts

* Lucid and accessible style makes the series appealing to the general reader
* Liberally illustrated throughout with stills from the film under discussion.
* Collaboration between Cork University Press and the Film Institute of Ireland. Between the première of Brian Friel s stage play "Dancing at Lughnasa" in 1990 and Pat O Connor s cinematic adaptation in 1998, Ireland experienced seismic economic and social changes, as well as "Riverdance", "Angela s Ashes" and an international vogue for all things Irish. Set in 1936, "Dancing at Lughnasa", as both film and play, imagines an anachronistic past in which the loss of joyous communal ritual is symptomatic of the cultural malaise so often associated with Ireland in the 1930s. Drawing upon unpublished material from the Friel archive at the National Library of Ireland, Joan FitzPatrick Dean contrasts the expressly theatrical elements of Friel s play and their cinematic counterparts

Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education and for St Clare’s International College, Oxford. He is general editor of the Ireland into Film series (2001-2007).

Gráinne Humphreys is image editor for the Series. She is Head of Education at the Irish Film Institute.

Joan FitzPatrick Dean Dean is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Fulbright Scholar at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a longtime contributor to Film West, she publishes on Irish and British drama and film.