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.

Mailer’s interest in film dates back to his early career, when he went to Hollywood in a failed attempt to work on a screenplay with friend and mentor Jean Malaquais. Despite this failure, Mailer did return to filmmaking in the 1960s, ultimately making Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone – three films that exemplify the kind of ambitious experimentation that defines so much of Mailer’s career. None of these films contain what could be considered a straightforward narrative; rather, Mailer instructed his actors to improvise around a theme while he let the camera run, later editing together hours of footage to create a more constrained piece. This chapter discusses Mailer’s journey to make these films, their reception, and the philosophy of cinema that influenced their creation, which Mailer outlines in his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk.”