Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition.This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the Bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume affirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies, but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ELLEN SCHEIBLE is a professor of English and director of honors at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. She is the author of Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland and coeditor of Rethinking Joyce’s “Dubliners.”

BARRY DEVINE is an associate professor of English at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. His recent work appears in The Cambridge Centenary “Ulysses” and The Irish Bildungsroman.
 

Foreword: Claire Bracken

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Ellen Scheible and Barry Devine

Critical Perspectives

1: María Amor Barros-del Río, “Youth Struggle and Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland in Sally Rooney’s Novels”

2: Jennifer A. Slivka, “‘Something New and Uncomfortably Familiar’: Sally Rooney’s Elusive Play with Genre”

3: Deirdre Flynn, “‘Bit hard to fit in’: Sally Rooney and the Rise of Ireland’s Campus Novel”

4: Mary McGlynn, “The Relational Novel in an Era of Individualization”

5: Colleen English, “‘maybe what Keats meant’: Sally Rooney and Romanticism”

6: Cassidy Allen, “‘Two little plants sharing the same plot of soil’: Twinned Bildungsromans in Sally Rooney’s Normal People”

7: Matthew J. Fee, “‘Lockdown Lovers’: The Spaces of Television’s Normal People”

8: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, “Conversations with Friends and the Queer Comedy of Remarriage” 

Pedagogical Approaches

9: Molly Ferguson, “‘I kind of suffer from anxiety with these things’: Disconnect and Emotional Resonance for College Students Reading Sally Rooney’s Novels” 

10: Rachael Sealy Lynch: “Edited Selves in Sally Rooney’s Fiction, or How I Learned to Think Like a Millennial”

11: John C. Kerrigan, “Moral Injury in Sally Rooney’s Normal People”

12: Barry Devine, “Teaching Narrative Empathy with Beautiful World, Where Are You”

13: Melania Terrazas, “Trauma, Writing, and Healing in Sally Rooney’s Normal People: A Pedagogical Approach”

Coda:Kristy DeStefano, “Revitalizing the Humanities: Gender, Literature, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Rooney’s Intermezzo

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index