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Author Biography
Standish James O'Grady (1846-1928) is known principally for his two-volume History of Ireland published in 1878 and 1880 and for his role in the Irish Literary Revival. He worked as a journalist on the Daily Express, the Dublin-based unionist newspaper, until 1898; after 1898 he edited his own newspapers and wrote for others including The Irish Worker. Edward A. Hagan is Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author High Nonsensical Words (Whitston, 1986), a study of O'Grady, and edited O'Grady's To the Leaders of Our Working People for the Classics of Irish History series.
Description
Sun and Wind was Standish James O'Grady's last work, which he was editing at the time of his death in 1928. Some parts of it were published as journal articles in his lifetime, but most is published here for the first time. Edward A. Hagan describes O'Grady as 'at once a political polemicist, a creative writer, and a somewhat unusual historian', involved in all three roles in this utopian treatise which 'reveals the pervasive influence of classical scholarship upon the Irish intellectual life of the period'. O'Grady argues for drastic change in Ireland in the first part and in the second makes extensive use of classical Greece as a model for Ireland.
Part I Sun and Wind
- An Irish sunrise
A little epic and a small hero
Child, teacher and book
Children and animals
A welcome visitor. Part II Nature and Man
- Nature, The reat Psalm, Air and light and heroic (To Young Ireland), Nations and nations, The Greek polis, Arcadia, An event of world history, The silent race, Homer's men, Greek women, A picture
Editor's notes.
"a welcome republication, intelligently introduced by Hagan in such a way as to emphasise its purely utopian dimensions."
Utopian Studies
16.1 2004
"O'Grady's Sun and Wind is well worth reading, whether from a historical, a literary or a general interest point of view. In it come together a number of trends which link the nineteenth with the twentieth century and that can still engage the reader today: social and political change, nationhood, religion, idealism, and childhood. It combines the romantic, the spiritual, the political and the personal, and presents O'Grady as a questioning and flexible thinker."
Irish Studies Review
13 (4) 2005
"University College Dublin Press has now published over thirty ‘Classics of Irish History'. These contemporary accounts by well known personalities of historical events and attitudes have an immediacy that conventional histories do not have. Introductions by modern historians provide additional historical background and, with hindsight, objectivity."
Books Ireland
Nov 2007
"Scholars of nineteenth-century Irish and Irish-American politics should reacquaint themselves with these classics, part of a long running and immensely useful series from University College Dublin Press."
Irish Literary Supplement
Fall 2008