Angelos Bollas is an independent scholar focusing on literature, sociology, education, and cultural studies while working as Education Development Specialist at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. He has studied English, sociology, education, and cultural studies at BA, MA, and PhD levels in Greece, the UK, and Ireland. He is the author of Contemporary Irish Masculinities: Male Homosociality in Sally Rooney’s Novels (2024), Sexualised Governmentalities: Critical Perspectives on Homosexism (2024), and Fashionable Queerness: Straight Appropriation of Queer Fashion (2024). He recently co-edited HIV/AIDS in Memory, Culture and Society (2024).

• Preface;1. Introduction; 2. The Spatial De-turn? (Non)representation of Place and Emerging Spaces in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You; 3. “An Intimacy as Close as Between the Sea and the Strand”: The Boundary between World and Body in Sally Rooney’s Normal People; 4. A Feminist Reading of Sally Rooney’s Novels Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Beautiful World, Where Are You?; 5. “Inside of a Glass Jar”: Visibilising Insidious Trauma in Conversations with Friends; 6. (De)Constructing Masculinities in Sally Rooney’s Novel Normal People and TV Series Adaptation; 7. Vulnerability and Female Sexuality in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018): Agent, Doer or Sufferer?; 8. Queer World, Where Are You? The Im/Possibility of Queer Love in Sally Rooney’s Novels; 9. Identity, Sociality and Love in Sally Rooney’s Normal People: Exploring the Tensions Between Philosophies of Authenticity, Ethics and Community; 10. The Ethics of Vulnerability and Relationality in a Collapsing World in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You; 11. ‘I Loved When He Was Available to Me Like This’: Modernisation and (Mis)communication; 12. Intimacy in Sally Rooney’s novels: ‘Being Alone with Her is Like Opening a Door Away from Normal Life and Then Closing It Behind Them; 13. Sex and Space in Contemporary Ireland: The Vicissitudes of Intimacy in Normal People; 14. Thoughtful Faces and Sleek Bodies: Thinness and the Politics of Consumption in the Fiction of Sally Rooney; 15. “It was just period pain”: Endometriosis as a Marker of Sexual Difference and Desirability in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends; 16. A Transmodern Reading of Sally Rooney’s Normal People: Millennial Vulnerabilities and the Paradox of Interconnectedness; 17. Bleeding in the Pews: Partial Faith in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You; 18. Changing Spaces in the Anthropocene: Solastalgia and the Search for Hope in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You; 19. “There Are a Lot of White People Here”: Race, Class and Relationality in the Screen Adaptations of Normal People and Conversations with Friends; 20. Hegemonic and Vulnerable Masculinities in Sally Rooney’s Normal People; 21. Sally Rooney’s Novels: The Aesthetics of the Contemporary Irish Bildungsroman; 22. The Dark Turn of Chick Lit in Sally Rooney’s Works; Index