For more than a quarter of a century, Sean O’Casey enjoyed living in what he called the ‘delightful county’ of Devon. O’Casey remained newsworthy in Ireland until his death, but he lived in relative anonymity in this English seaside area, and today the county does little to remember the writer. This chapter examines the way that O’Casey interacted with the local area of Devon, and the chapter also illustrates how his writing was shaped by the personal events that happened in this geographical location, such as the death of his son Niall from cancer in 1956, his interaction with Devon neighbours, and the contact he enjoyed with visitors who travelled to meet him, such as the Irish playwright Denis Johnston.

Sean O’Casey’s first produced play, The Shadow of a Gunman was submitted to the Abbey Theatre in 1922, the publication year of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He was a contemporary of modernists including Woolf, Pound, and Eliot, yet O’Casey’s work is rarely considered in accounts of modernism. This chapter considers how figures including Samuel Beckett, Denis Johnston, and Katharine Worth have offered a consideration of O’Casey that looks past the quasi-realistic surface of his early work to find a dramatist of experimentalism and of sardonic humour who produced creative work that coincides with modernism yet that resists critical categories.

This chapter reconsiders the cultural condition of 1940s Ireland in the context of wartime neutrality, exploring the literary response to the hostilities in Ireland itself, north and south, and the complex positioning of the writers involved who treated its effects on a domestic landscape, including Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Benedict Kiely. How did Irish writers respond to the aftermath of the Second World War and, in particular, the filtering of information about the Holocaust? The Irish author and playwright Denis Johnston, a BBC correspondent in the Middle East for much of the conflict, represents one of those with direct experience of the action and its diplomatic fallout. This chapter challenges a historical acceptance that Ireland became increasingly insular and detached as a result of its wartime political neutrality, and identifies instead a set of important literary engagements driven by the wider horizon of the conflict.