George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905-30

Now available in paperback! George Russell (1867-1935), poet and author, was a central figure of the Irish literary revival. He was a radical intellectual involved with anarchism, labor and Sinn Féin, his passions evidencing a revival in Irish thought that merged literature and culture with politics and revolution. This book brings the reader to a world of constant controversy, of journals, little magazines, pamphlets and propaganda, narrated here in one major synthesis. *** "The story [Allen] has to tell is a fascinating retrieval of cultural debate in the crucial years of the founding of the State. In this important new book, AE appears primarily not as painter, poet, or bicycling organiser of rural cooperatives, but as the brilliant editor of the Irish Homestead (1905-23) and the Irish Statesman (1923-30). Alongside first publication of works by Joyce, Kavanagh, O'Casey, O'Connor, Ó Faoláin, O'Flaherty, Shaw, Stuart and Yeats, [Russell] propagandised on behalf of a remarkable sequence of causes, from co-operative creameries and collective banks, to the Shannon hydroelectric scheme and the commercial potential of an international airport in Ireland." --Adrian Frazier, Irish Times [Subject: Irish Cultural History, Irish Literature, Modern History, Irish Studies]