‘Outside,’ said the barmaid: repetition as a temporal location marker
This post has been removed because the content is now available in book form with many other essays and blog posts previously available on this site. The book is titled Ungrammaticalities: Linguistic Literary Criticism from ‘The Battle of Maldon’ to Muriel Spark, and it is available for purchase HERE from August 2024.
Please see this page for the cover art and table of contents.
Aunty Muriel's Blog 
Good stuff! Such repetition is also significant in long poems, such as Beowulf, where it also serves other purposes than temporal markers.
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Thank you, and yes indeed – repetition is an endlessly useful device, and Spark uses it in all sorts of ways. It’s intrinsic to Spark’s writing and far from being redundant, repetition actually seems to be part of the ‘economy’ of her style that everyone mentions (but rarely qualifies!).
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