A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Summary/Abstract: The article begins with addressing alleged similarities between Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and James Joyce’s works to suggest that they cannot be systematically sustained. Her much praised, experimental style relies on the opposite of Joycean richness. Limited vocabulary, jumbled word order, and lexical and phrasal repetitions are one of the most salient features of her style. McBride applies rhetorical variants of conduplicatio to create an emotionally powerful idiom to narrate an anti-Bildungsroman about a loving sister and her dying brother, her sexual abuse by an uncle and final suicide. So despite some thematic parallels, and linguistic experimentation, A Girl bears only superficial resemblance to the modernist master, which is additionally evidenced by stylometric findings.

• Details
• Contents