While the connection between Ireland and the otherworldly has long been a staple of literature and the arts, it finds its most consistent and compelling expression in the medium of cinema. In the first comprehensive scholarly study of the fantastic in Irish film, Fantastic Spaces explores how the spatial dimensions of supernatural phenomena in Irish cinema interpret and engage with the dynamic changes that have swept across Ireland over the past four decades.
Drawing on a wide range of both canonical and lesser-known Irish films, Matthew J. Fee closely examines how the fantastic—including a multiplicity of supernatural occurrences and creatures drawn from Irish folklore as well as global popular culture—functions to make meaning across a period of profound social, political, and cultural transformation in Ireland. From providing platforms for female agency and interrogating rural heritage and nostalgia, to articulating anxieties over modernization and globalization and questioning national identities, the fantastic spaces of Irish cinema reveal a sophisticated capacity to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of historical change.