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Sam Hanna Bell's debut novel (1951), about life in a tight-knit Presbyterian community in turn-of-the-century Northern Ireland, was adapted for the screen by David Rudkin and directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan in 1990. Both as a novel and as a film, December Bride is a remarkable combination of passion and politics set against a rural backdrop of communal constraint and individual action. Visually and thematically, the film is a timely reinvestigation of Ulster Protestant history and culture, and in particular reclaims a tradition of radical independent thought exemplified by the work of Sam Hanna Bell. Drawing on previously unpublished archival material and new interviews, Lance Pettitt explores the intricate relationship between novel, screenplay and the wider film culture. December Bride is a consummate and provocative challenge to the politics of Irish society, its cinematic representations, and to the very process of film adaptation itself.

Although eighty years separate John Huston's film from James Joyce's text, the presence of The Dead can be found earlier in European cinema, in Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1953). Kevin Barry explores the extraordinary relationships between these three works, and the radically different aesthetics of fidelity and infidelity practiced by these exemplary artists of the twentieth century.