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uncanny child

Posted on July 20, 2020

Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl: A Bildungsroman for the Monstrous Child

Sara McCartney

The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 debut novel, lives at the intersection of three contemporaneous trends. Most scholarly attention locates it among Nigerian diasporic literature, which experienced a boom in American and English publishing at the start of the twenty-first century.[i] Indeed, The Icarus Girl remains Oyeyemi’s most overtly Nigerian novel. Less recognized is The Icarus Girl’s contribution to two of horror’s big turn-of-the-millennium booms – creepy kid movies, which were having quite a moment with offerings like The Ring (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Others (2001), and children’s gothic literature, whose prominent titles include The Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2007) and Coraline (2002). Oyeyemi’s melding of these three disparate subgenres and their expectations creates a distinctly postcolonial and humanized uncanny child.

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