Religion and Spirituality in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are you
| Thesis title in Czech: | Náboženství a spiritualita v románech A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing Eimear McBrideové a Beautiful World, Where Are you Sally Rooneyové |
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| Thesis title in English: | Religion and Spirituality in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are you |
| Key words: | Sally Rooney|Eimear McBride|religion and spirituality|religion in Irish literature|contemporary Irish prose|Irish women's fiction |
| English key words: | Sally Rooney|Eimear McBride|náboženství a spiritualita|náboženství v irské literatuře|současná irská próza|irská ženská próza |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2022/2023 |
| Thesis type: | Bachelor's thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | Mgr. Daniela Theinová, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 31.01.2023 |
| Date of assignment: | 01.02.2023 |
| Administrator's approval: | approved |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 01.02.2023 |
| Date and time of defence: | 04.09.2023 09:30 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 07.08.2023 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 04.09.2023 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | doc. Clare Wallace, M.A., Ph.D. |
| Guidelines |
| In my thesis, I would like to focus on the role of spirituality, critique of organised religion and the extremely uncertain concept of God in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. While focusing on works by these two well-known representatives of contemporary Irish prose, I will also comment on the general relevance of religious symbols in the Irish novel. Religion has been an essential part of modern Irish culture; with the new authors, however, there has been a shift of focus. They explore new, more progressive themes and express a rather more equivocal stance to religion as their protagonists are often in search of what spirituality means for them personally and what part it should play in their life. This shift is evident in the two novels I chose to discuss in my thesis. While religion or faith are not the central theme in either of these works, they are used to foreground other concerns, such as the position of women in the society and family, the impact of feminism on McBride’s and Rooney’s characters and their communities, personal trauma and different kinds of abuse. In order to understand how A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Beautiful World, Where Are You employ specific narrative techniques to express their views on religion and spirituality, I want to compare the structural features of the two works. Because neither author uses complex vocabulary or rich figures of speech, I will centre my analysis on how such simplification helps to evolve themes of religion. I will study the narrative structures, such as characterization, use of contrasting characters and elements of plot, of the two works, in order to explore their various perspectives on religion and belief. This conjoint analysis of both formal and motific elements in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and Beautiful World, Where Are You will allow me to comment on the overall development of these themes in modern Irish literature and the changing stance of the society on faith and religion. |
| References |
| Primary Sources McBride, Eimear. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. London: Faber & Faber, 2016. Rooney, Sally. Beautiful World, Where Are You. London: Faber & Faber, 2022. Secondary Sources Bartlett, Thomas. The Cambridge History of Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Harris, Mary N. “Beleaguered but Determined: Irish Women Writers in Irish.” Feminist Review, no. 51 (1995): 26–40.https://doi.org/10.2307/1395503. Hegarty, Neil. The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People. St. Martin’s Press, 2012. Foss Aran, and Ward Sell. “Light and the Lens: Streams of Damaged Consciousness in Post-Crash Irish Modernist Fiction,” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2020. Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Morio, Teruko. “Feminism in Contemporary Irish Literature.” The Harp 11 (1996): 88–88.http://www.jstor.org/stable/20539085. Nolan, Emer. Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Pašeta, Senia. Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Stevens Lorna, Stephen Brown, and Pauline Maclaran. “Gender, Nationality and Cultural Representations of Ireland: An Irish Woman’s Place?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 7, no. 4 (2020): 405–421.https://doi.org/10.1177/135050680000700412. Ukić Košta, Vesna. “Irish Women’s Fiction of the Twentieth Century: The Importance of Being Catholic.” ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 11, no. 2 (2014): 51–63. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.11.2.51-63. Welch, Robert. Irish Writers and Religion. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991. Wolfreys, Julian, et al. Key Concepts in Literary Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. |