As Ruth Barton notes in her introduction, this anthology is, remarkably, “the first collection of essays on Irish-American cinema” (1). This is all the more surprising given that the last ten years have witnessed a growing scholarly and commercial interest in Irishness on screen, encompassing both Hollywood representations of Ireland, Irishness and Irish American identity, and home-grown Irish cinema itself. Recent titles include Diane Negra's edited collection The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture (2006); Maria Pramaggiore's Irish and African American Cinema: Identifying Others and Performing Identities, 1980–2000 (2008) and Neil Jordan (2008); Martin McLoone's Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland: Cityscapes, Landscapes, Soundscapes (2008); Michael Patrick Gillespie's The Myth of an Irish Cinema: Approaching Irish-Themed Films (2008); and Barton's own books, Jim Sheridan: Framing the Nation (2002) and Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell (2006). The volume can certainly be seen to contribute to and extend these recent works. In particular, the concerns of Negra's volume are widely acknowledged and cited in essays by Gilligan, Boyd, Monahan and Brereton. Meanwhile, Negra's own contribution to Barton's collection identifies a shift away from a trend she saw at work in representations of Irishness on US television of the 1990s towards a darker phase “in which the unqualified nostalgia and romantic sentimentality of many of its 1990s texts play little to no part” (281).

The collection emerges “out of a period when questions of Irish-American identity have been reinvigorated by their intersection with other discourses,” especially whiteness studies (2). The relationship between Irishness and whiteness is certainly prominent in the collection, from discussions of Irish–Jewish relations in early Hollywood cinema, to Kathleen Vejvoda's comparison of The Nephew (1998) and In America (2002). Other thematic threads that Barton identifies in the introduction that are explored by the contributors are the relationship between Irish American cinema and the Catholic Church, the representation of women in Irish American cinema, the cinematic “roots” or return journey to Ireland and the depiction of urban space, notably Hell's Kitchen in New York and South Boston, in Irish American films. The collection also includes discussions of the work of individual auteurs: John Ford, Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan (an interview with Sheridan is included at the end of the volume).

This is a wide-ranging and comprehensive book with twenty-two essays, all but three of which are original. I do think the decision to reprint Kevin Rockett's essay “The Irish Migrant and Film” (1994) was misguided because it suggests, erroneously, that there is a dearth of contemporary scholarship on early cinema and Irish America. In fact, Rockett's essay is succeeded by three fine essays: Timothy Meagher's is an examination of the preoccupation with Irish–Jewish relations in early Hollywood comedies and an attempt to account for the failure of the formula when it was revisited in US television in the 1970s and beyond; Gwenda Young's analysis of early stars Mary Pickford and Mabel Normand builds on Diane Negra's earlier work, Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (2001); and Christopher Shannon is interested in the “Bowery Cinderella” films of the early twentieth century, in which the Irish American female protagonist “most often rejects her Prince Charming for a local boy, affirming the values of place and community against the allure of upward mobility” (77). As such, the films contradict (and, by extension, critique) contemporaneous literary and stage representations that scapegoated Irish American women for their social-climbing aspirations.

Because much scholarly criticism has recently been devoted to the vogue for all things Irish in US cinema, television and popular culture from the 1990s to the present, it is particularly gratifying that so many essays in this collection focus on the pre-1960 period. The volume is certainly a significant contribution to an increasingly rich and varied scholarly terrain.