George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905-30.
Author: ALLEN, Nicholas.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. 267 pages. Hardback.
“GEORGE RUSSELL (1867-1935) was a poet, prose writer, polemicist and painter. A radical intellectual, his great achievement was to edit, over four decades, two of twentieth-century Ireland’s most important journals, the Irish Homestead and Irish Statesman. Contributors included, over time, the best in then contemporary Irish writing - Austin Clarke, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Sean O’Casey, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, James Stephens and William Butler Yeats.
This book uncovers George Russell as active agent in a nation, and then a state, where anarchism, co-operation, labour and capital fought for popular recognition through pamphlets, periodicals, newssheets and weeklies. These fugitive forms are integrated here in one major narrative, giving the reader a new sense of Irish literature as ephemera, experiment, authority and dissent. The period’s great controversies - the 1913 Lock-Out, the First World War, the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars, the Russian Revolution, the founding of the Irish state - are recast in contexts - of dada, futurism, fascism, socialism, evolution and science - that restore Russell as a driving force in the island’s intellectual development. This is a study of George Russell, writer, editor and thinker, in a new Ireland of radical action and revolutionary change.
Nicholas Allen lectures in English at the Dublin Institute of Technology. A former Government of Ireland Research Fellow, he is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin.”
ISBN: 1851826912
|
