The linguistic representation of working-class Glaswegians in James Kelman's short stories: a corpus-based analysis

Abstract EN

Representing reality in literary writings has always been of perennial interest to literary authors.

among them is James Kelman, who himself claims on many occasions to realistically represent his community, the working-class Glaswegians, in Scotland.

by mapping his writings on a proposed model inspired by Macaulay’s (2002, 2005) findings, this article argues, based on a corpus-based analysis of two short story collections written in 1990s, that Kelman linguistically represents working-class Glaswegians but not to the edge of extremity to consider his writings a speech transcription.

from the two collections that constitute the corpus under study, the burn (1991) and the good times (1998), the article concludes that Kelman‟s linguistic representation to his own community is realistic; however, his realism is stylistically inventive and aesthetically peculiar to him.