Irish Masculinity on Screen: The Pugilists and Peacemakers of John Ford, Jim Sheridan and Paul Greengrass

Examining images of gender and violence, this book analyzes selected works of three influential artists of the Irish cinema—Ford, Sheridan and Greengrass—whose careers, taken together, span the period from 1939 to the present. These three explore fundamental questions about identity, patriarchy and violence within Irish and Irish-American contexts, and in the process upset conventional notions of masculine authority. Furthermore, Ford’s later films interestingly depart from the egalitarian ideals that distinguish his pre–World War II films.