Between Innovation and Iteration: Post-Joycean Heteroglossia in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
Between Innovation and Iteration: Post-Joycean Heteroglossia in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

Summary/Abstract: Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) is a prime specimen of post-Joycean heteroglossia in Irish fiction. The novel exhibits a programmatic dialogical/intertextual orientation orchestrated with its own parodic and ironic modes, which makes McBride’s work uniquely capable of re-energizing Irish cultural tradition. Simultaneously, her novel contributes its own distinct voice to the impressive amplitude of artistic expressions which have emerged from Irish culture in the wake of Joyce’s writings. Mikhail Bahtin’s approach to the novel (as discussed in The Dialogic Imagination), in turn, is particularly relevant to McBride’s fiction because of her incorporation (as well as adaptation) of a variety of voices and perspectives.

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