Ebook: James Kelman

James Kelman is Scotland's most influential contemporary prose artist. This is the first book-length study of his groundbreaking novels. It analyses and contextualizes each in detail. It argues that while Kelman offers a coherent and consistent vision of the world, each novel should be read as a distinct literary response to particular aspects of contemporary working-class language and culture. This study resists the prevalent condemnations of Kelman as a miserable realist and produces evidence that he is acutely aware of an unorthodox, politicized literary tradition that transgresses definitions of what literature can or should do. This study is boldly self-critical and questions the validity and values of its own methods. Kelman is shown to be deftly humorous, assiduously ethical, philosophically alert, and politically necessary.