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Half-Formed Modernism: Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

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2020-06-24
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Ward Sell, Aran. “Half-Formed Modernism: Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing”. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, June 2020, https://ojs.lib.unideb.hu/hjeas/article/view/7158.
Abstract

This paper positions Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) at the vanguard of a resurgent modernism in the 21st-century Irish novel, in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crash. It asserts the value of experimental literature to a country which has awoken from a dream of late capitalist prosperity into a sobering confrontation with late capitalist crisis.
McBride’s novel reproduces certain generic characteristics of the historical realism which was the dominant literary mode of Celtic Tiger Ireland. However, it also innovates: McBride’s new, fragmentary adaptation of Joycean stream-of-consciousness navigates its familiar themes through the internal states of its traumatized protagonist.