Sally Rooney's Inclusiveness in Beautiful World Where Are You?

17th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Elazığ, Türkiye, 7 - 09 Mayıs 2025, ss.122-123, (Özet Bildiri)

Sally Rooney is engaged in an inclusive worldmaking by creating a textual space for diverse

characters and genres. Contemporary Irish women’s writing yields a direct interest in the post-

millennial global agenda in the post-Celtic Tiger period steering its attention to post-millennial

concerns like people’s well-being, the soul-destroying effects of consumerism, capitalism, and

the planet's future. In Rooney’s tertiary novel Beautiful World the four characters, though

having different backgrounds, lifestyles, and beliefs, are in pursuit of making sense of life in

their unique ways. The ability to devise a genuine way of holding onto life, being one of the

oldest issues raised on the planet, is of interest to Alice disfiguring the importance of fame and

wealth as a writer, of Eileen a language editor of a magazine seeking alternative ways to attach

herself to a meaningful life by gauging giving birth to a baby, of Simon taking refuge in the

performativity of religion and of Felix a worker at a warehouse trying his hand in singing and

bisexual affairs. The novel achieves inclusiveness not only with these various characters’

experiences but also by conflating the zeitgeist of the post-millennial spirit with social media

apps like Tinder or WhatsApp. The experience of these flawed characters is variegated and

Rooney’s novel promotes inclusiveness by building inextricable generic relations. Taxonomical

ways of handling genres might be disaffecting. Still, the book can be seen in the light of a genre

fiction due to following some common tropes, an auto-fiction due to Alice and Rooney’s similar

concerns about being a well-known auth