George Russell (Æ) and the New Ireland, 1905–30

Nicholas Allen

George Russell (1867–1935), poet and author, was a central figure of the Irish literary revival. He was editor of early 20th-century Ireland's two most important journals, the Irish Homestead (1905–23) and the Irish Statesman (1923–30). Russell published work across four decades by Joyce, Kavanagh, O'Casey, O'Connor, Ó Faoláin, O'Flaherty, Shaw, Stuart and Yeats. He was a radical intellectual involved with anarchism, labour 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.

Nicholas Allen is the Moore Professor, in the Moore Institute at NUI Galway. He has edited, with Aaron Kelly, The Cities of Belfast (2003) and That Island Never Found (2007) with Eve Patten.