“Taking Liberties with Reality”: “Fiction” and the “Making of” The Quiet Man

Abstract

This chapter explores Steve Mayhew’s “Making of” novel, Connemara Days (1999), as a fictional counterpart to the “Making of” documentaries and popular studies explored in Chapter 4. It examines the novel’s iteration of the traits and dynamics that emerged across the audio–visual and print “non-fiction” “Making of” The Quiet Man texts, focusing on the novel’s intensification of the adaptive mode. The chapter analyzes the distinction between the conception of adaptation promoted by the novel (adaptation as substitutive continuity) and the conception of adaptation enacted by the novel (adaptation as a blend of contestatory elements), in the context of the novel’s exploitation of the trans-cultural nostalgic imperatives identified in Chapter 4.