| As a rising star in the Irish literary world,Sally Rooney’s(1991-)novel Conversations with Friends(2017)has aroused heated discussion in the British and American literary field,and has been hailed by the media as the “voice of the millennial generation” and the youngest ever winner of the British Book Award and the Costa Book Award.Her major works include Mr Salary(2016),Conversations with Friends,Normal People(2018),Color and Light(2019),and her latest novel,Beautiful World,Where Are You(2021).In Conversations with Friends and Normal People,Rooney explores class relations,passion,fragility and crisis of love,complex entanglements of family relationships and friendship after the Celtic Tiger with her brilliant psychological descriptions and delicate writing.At the same time,she creates innovative images of women that give men the power of redemption in gender relationship,breathing vitality into contemporary fiction.Currently,domestic and international studies of Sally Rooney’s works have mainly been conducted from the perspective of cultural studies,exploring them in terms of class differences,Irish identity,religious beliefs and so on.However,Rooney’s innovative portrayal of women’s images as a typical representative of women’s writing in the new era has not yet received sufficient attention.Based on this,this paper takes Conversations with Friends and Normal People as the study texts and analyzes the main female characters in both texts through a close reading of the novels.The paper explores the new mode of Rooney’s female writing from three levels: the novelist’s perspectives of portraying the innovative images of women,her departure from the traditional view of womanhood,and the influence of globalization on her portrayal of female images.This thesis is divided into five parts.The first chapter is the research background,outlining Ireland’s long literary tradition and the rise of female writers in Irish literature.Then it introduces Sally Rooney,a representative of Irish female writers in the 21 st century,and her two works,Conversations with Friends and Normal People,and summarizes the current state of research at home and abroad,pointing out the relative lack of domestic and international interpretations of Rooney and her innovative portrayal of women’s images.Chapter two provides a detailed analysis of Sally Rooney’s innovative portrayal of women from three aspects,which are the mutual construction and interdependence between the female and male protagonists,women’s redemption toward men and female images’ own defects.Although the main female characters in both novels suffer from psychological and physical defects,they both exert positive influences on the male characters and seek harmony and balance in the relationship between the sexes.This part also explores the development of Rooney’s portrayal of women,combined with her other works.Chapter three aims to explore Sally Rooney’s innovation in the portrayal of female images by comparing her female images with those of some other famous Irish writers.From“woman as a historical burden of the nation” in the earlier Irish literature to Rooney’s conscious departure from this tradition in her two novels,this part will interpret Rooney’s new view on the portrayal of females’ images after breaking away from the traditional mode.Chapter four tries to reveal the importance of Sally Rooney’s writing under the background of globalization.This section deems that,Rooney,as a new generation of women writers in the 21 st century,not only expresses her concern for the survival of women in modern society in her works,but also contributes to expanding the acceptance of Irish literature in the process of globalization.Finally,the thesis concludes that Rooney,as a female writer in the era of globalization,presents an innovative image of women that is different from previous Irish literary traditions.This new image of women derives from both Rooney’s gender relation and the globalized era in which she lives,thus giving her a new mode of writing to portray women.Young female writer Sally Rooney’s definition of Irish cultural identity is no longer confined to religious,regional and national identity,but actively explores new trends in Irish literary creation and cultural dissemination in the process of globalization. |
