Standish OGrady was a major figure of the Irish Literary Revival whose work has received scant attention. The new assessment situates his literary, historical and political writing in its European intellectual context and considers the far-reaching implications of his work for intellectual activity in contemporary Ireland. McAteer argues that attempts to read him as either unionist or nationalist overlook the essentially contradictory nature of his writing. As a man of letters who believed that literature divorced from ...
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Standish OGrady was a major figure of the Irish Literary Revival whose work has received scant attention. The new assessment situates his literary, historical and political writing in its European intellectual context and considers the far-reaching implications of his work for intellectual activity in contemporary Ireland. McAteer argues that attempts to read him as either unionist or nationalist overlook the essentially contradictory nature of his writing. As a man of letters who believed that literature divorced from history was pernicious, and as an historian who believed that history divorced from imagination was no more history than a skeleton is a man, OGrady internalised yet looked beyond the divisions that continue to structure intellectual debate in Ireland today, whether in terms of history against literature, fact against theory or, most recently, revisionism against post-colonialism. By so doing, McAteer claims he provided the framework for a new form of politics that f
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