KELMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY: GROUPED BY THEME
This version of the bibliography is grouped into sections; sources may appear under several headings.
It is also available as one giant list.
A fully annotated version (with summaries of around 100 selected sources) is available via Oxford Bibliographies (paywall).
James Kelman’s own website is being redeveloped, and I’ll link to it here in due course.
Introductions and Overviews
Bernstein, Stephen. 2000. “James Kelman.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 20.3: 42-80.
Carruthers, Gerard. 1997. “James Kelman.” Post-War Literatures in English 18 (March 1997): 1-14.
Craig, Cairns. 1993. “Resisting Arrest: James Kelman.” In The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams, edited by Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson, 99-114. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hames, Scott, ed. 2010. Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa and Willy Maley, eds. 2002. “Kelman and Commitment.” Edinburgh Review 108: 21-122. [Special part-issue of journal collecting eight articles on Kelman; articles cited separately below.]
Klaus, H. Gustav. 1994. “Kelman for Beginners.” Journal of the Short Story in English, 22: 127-135.
Klaus, H. Gustav. 2004. James Kelman. Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House.
Kövesi, Simon. 2007. James Kelman. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Milne, Drew. 1992. “James Kelman: Dialectics of Urbanity.” Swansea Review 13: 393-407.
Kelman Essays, Biographical Sources and selected interviews
Kelman Essays, Statements and Radical History:
Kelman, James, 1992. Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political. Stirling, Scotland: AK Press.
Kelman, James. 2006. “Introduction” to Born Up a Close: Memoirs of a Brigton Boy by Hugh Savage, 9-65. Glendaruel, Argyll: Argyll Publishing.
Kelman, James. 2008. “And the judges said…”: Essays. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
Key Interviews and Biographical Sources:
NB many key interviews — 29 in total — are now collected in James Kelman, All We Have Is the Story: Selected Interviews 1973-2022 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2024)
Brooks, Libby. 2016. “James Kelman: ‘Intimidation, provocation, contempt –that’s the working class experience’.” Guardian, 15 July [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/books-interview-james-kelman-working-class-experience]
Clark, William. 2001. “A Conversation with James Kelman.” Variant 2.12: 3-7. [http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue12/variant_issue12.pdf]
Harris, Roxy. 2009. “An Interview with James Kelman.” Wasafiri 24.2: 21-26. [https://doi.org/10.1080/02690050902771597]
Kelman, James. 1995. “K is for Culture.” Scottish Trade Union Review 68 (Jan/Feb): 24-29.
Kelman, James. 2007. “Afterword.” In An Old Pub Near the Angel and Other Stories, 121-84. Edinburgh: Birlinn. [Extended personal essay and memoir; this edition includes a 1973 interview with Anne Stevenson (Scotsman, 14 July 1973)].
McLean, Duncan. 1985. “James Kelman Interviewed.” Edinburgh Review 71: 64-80.
McNeill, Kirsty. 1989. “Interview with James Kelman.” Chapman 57: 1-9.
No Author. 2018. “Interview with James Kelman.” Thi Wurd 3: 1-23.
Toremans, Tom. 2003. “An Interview with Alasdair Gray and James Kelman.” Contemporary Literature 44.4: 565-86. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3250586]
BY PERIOD AND FORM
Kelman’s Earlier Fiction (to 1994)
Bell, Ian A. 1990. “James Kelman.” New Welsh Review 10: 18-22.
Dixon, Keith. 1990. “Punters and Smoky Breath: The Writings of James Kelman.” Écosse: Littérature et Civilisation 9: 65-77.
Engledow, Sarah. 2002. “Studying Form: The Off-The-Page Politics of A Chancer.” Edinburgh Review 108: 69-84.
Kelly, Aaron. 2009. “‘I just tell the bloody truth, as I see it’: James Kelman’s A Disaffection, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Melancholy Knowledge.” Études écossaises 12: 79-99. [https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/193]
Knights, Ben. 1999. “‘The Wean and That’: Paternity and Domesticity in The Busconductor Hines’ in Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction, 180-94. London: Palgrave.
McMillan, Neil. 2002. “Wilting, or the ‘Poor Wee Boy Syndrome’: Kelman and Masculinity.” Edinburgh Review 108: 41-55.
Miller, Karl. 1989. “Glasgow Hamlet” in Authors, 156-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Murphy, Terence Patrick. 2007. “From Alignment to Commitment: The Early Work of James Kelman.” Cultural Logic 10 (Summer 2007). [Via Researchgate]
Shanks, Paul. 2010. “Early Kelman.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 9-19. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Spinks, Lee. 2002. “In Juxtaposition to Which: Narrative, System and Subjectivity in the Fiction of James Kelman.” Edinburgh Review 108: 85-105.
How late it was, how late and the 1994 Booker Prize
Bayley, John. 1994. “Why we chose James Kelman.” The Times, 12 October.
Bell, Ian A. 1994. “Empty Intensifiers: Kelman Wins ‘The Booker’ (At last).” New Welsh Review 27: 12-14.
Dalrymple, James. 2022. “Focalization, fight and flânerie: James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late and the crime novel.” Études britanniques contemporaines 63. [https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/12534]
Gearhart, Stephannie. S. 2010. “‘The More There Is To See’: Another Look at James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late.” Scottish Literary Review 2.1: 77-94.
Gilbert, Geoff. 1999. “Can Fiction Swear? James Kelman and the Booker Prize.” In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, edited by Rod Mengham, 219-34. Cambridge: Polity.
Hames, Scott. 2009. “Eyeless in Glasgow: James Kelman’s Existential Milton.” Contemporary Literature 50.3: 496-527. [https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.0.0073]
Hamill, Brian. 2019. “Narrative Artistry in James Kelman’s Novel” [marking the 25th anniversary of Kelman’s Booker]. The Common Breath. [http://thecommonbreath.com/essays1.html]
Jenkins, Simon. 1994. “An Expletive of a Winner.” The Times, 15 October.
McGlynn, Mary. 2002. “‘Middle-Class Wankers’ and Working-Class Texts: The Critics and James Kelman.” Contemporary Literature 43.1: 50-84. [http://doi.org/10.2307/1209016]
McGlynn, Mary. 2010. “How late it was, how late and Literary Value.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 20-30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
McNeill, Dougal. 2008. “‘Edging Back Into Awareness:’ How Late it Was, How Late, Form and the Utopian Demand’, COLLOQUY text theory critique 15. [http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts-files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_fifteen/mcneill.pdf]
Mohan, Anupama. 2021. “The Lumpenproletariat and the Itinerary of a Concept: Some Literary Reflections.” Asian Review of World Histories 9: 225-258. [Reads How late alongside Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Herbert (1993) and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), by way of ‘refining Marxian and Fanonian understandings of lumpenproletariat’.]
Müller, Christine Amanda. 2002. “How James Kelman Survived the Booker Prize.” Counterpoints [Graduate Conference Proceedings, Flinders University] 2.1. [http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/projects/counterpoints/Proc_2002/A6.htm]
Pitchford, Nicola. 2000. “How Late It Was for England: James Kelman’s Scottish Booker Prize.” Contemporary Literature 41.1: 693-725. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1209008]
Travis, Anna. 2019. “Interior Monologue as Social Critique in James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late.” Études britanniques contemporaines 56 [https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/6857]
Wood, James. 1994. “In Defence of Kelman.” Guardian, 25 October.
Later Fiction (1995- )
Boxall, Peter. 2010. “Kelman’s Later Novels.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 31-41. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Braidwood, Alistair. 2018. “Go West: James Kelman’s American Odyssey.” Bottle Imp 23. [https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/07/go-west-james-kelmans-american-odyssey/]
Dussol, Vincent. 2013. “James Kelman’s Confrontational Ethics in You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free.” In Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Christine Reynier, 181-92. Montpelier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée.
Gilmour, Rachel. 2020. Bad English: Literature, multilingualism, and the politics of language in contemporary Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press (chapter 6 on Translated Accounts, see also chapter 1).
Hagemann, Susanne. 2005. “Postcolonial translation studies and James Kelman’s Translated Accounts.” Scottish Studies Review 6.1: 74-83.
Hames, Scott. 2015. “Kelman, Suspicion and the Fantasy of Homeland Security.” Bottle Imp 18. [https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2015/06/kelman-suspicion-and-the-fantasy-of-homeland-security/]
Hames, Scott. 2016. “‘Maybe Singing into Yourself’: James Kelman, Inner Speech and Vocal Communion.” In Community in Modern Scottish Literature, edited by Scott Lyall, 196-213. Leiden, Brill.
Hames, Scott. 2022. “James Kelman and Everyone Else.” Honest Ulsterman, February 2022. [https://humag.co/features/scott-hames]
Jones, Carole. 2015. “James Kelman’s Melancholic Politics.” Scottish Literary Review 7.1 (Spring/Summer): 89-112. [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582221]
Klaus, H. Gustav. 2005. “Anti-Authoritarianism in the Later Fiction of James Kelman.” In “To Hell with Culture”: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, edited by H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, 162-177. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Korzeniowska, Aniela. 2010. “James Kelman: A Resistance to Transfer.” International Journal of Scottish Literature 7. [http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue7/korzeniowska.htm]
Manfredi, Camille. 2015. “Tales from the Pigeon Hole: James Kelman’s Migrant Voices.” Études anglaises 68.2: 210-223.
Milne, Drew. 2001. “Broken English: James Kelman’s Translated Accounts.” Edinburgh Review 108: 106-115.
Rinzler, Simone. 2015. “A Political Philosophy of Stylistic Defamiliarization: Ethics of the Post-Apocalyptic Self or What Is Really Translated in James Kelman’s Translated Accounts?” In The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity: New Perspectives on Genre Literature, edited by Maylis Rospide and Sandrine Sorlin, 48-62. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Schoene, Berthold. 2009. “James Kelman’s Cosmopolitan Jeremiads.” In The Cosmopolitan Novel, 66-94. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Spencer, Robert. 2019. “The Post-Work Society and James Kelman’s Dirt Road.” Keywords 17: 48-67.
Vericat, Fabio. 2011. “Letting the Writing do the Talking: Denationalising English and James Kelman’s Translated Accounts.” Scottish Literary Review 3.1 (Spring/Summer): 129-51.
Wood, James. 2014. “Away Thinking About Things” [review-article on Kelman’s story collection If it was your life]. New Yorker. 25 August 2014. [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/away-thinking-things]
Short Story and drama Criticism
Archibald, David. 2010. “Kelman’s Drama.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 65-71. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hunter, Adrian. 2010. “Kelman and the Short Story.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 42-52. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lansdown, Richard. 2014. “Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not not while the giro.” Scottish Literary Review 6.2 (Autumn/Winter): 67-92. [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/562529/pdf]
Macarthur, J.D. 1996. “The Narrative Voice in James Kelman’s The Burn.” Studies in English Literature [English Literary Society of Japan] 72.2: 181-195.
Macarthur, J.D. 2004. “A Sense of Place: Narrative Perspective in the Short Stories of James Kelman.” Journal of the Short Story in English 42 (Spring 2004): 75-89. [https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/378]
Macarthur, J.D. 2007. Claiming Your Portion of Space: A Study of the Short Stories of James Kelman. Tokyo: Hokuseido.
May, Charles. 2015. “James Kelman and the ‘Art’, Not the Message, of the Short Story.” Reading the Short Story [Blog post] [http://may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com/2015/07/james-kelman-and-art-not-social-message.html]
Milne, Drew. 1992. “James Kelman: Dialectics of Urbanity.” Swansea Review 13: 393-407.
Murphy, Terence Patrick. 2003. “Durational Realism? Voice over Narrative in James Kelman’s An Old Pub near the Angel, and Other Stories.” Journal of Narrative Theory 33.3: 335-355. [https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2010.0003]
Murphy, Terence Patrick. 2006. “‘Getting Rid of that Standard Third Party Narrative Voice’: The Development of James Kelman’s Early Authorial Style.” Language and Literature 15(2): 183-99. [https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963947006063746]
Nistor, Gabriela. 2004. “The Paranoiac Dimension of James Kelman’s Short Story Characters.” American, British and Canadian Studies [Anglophone Society of Romania] 4 (December). [http://abcjournal.ulbsibiu.ro/Gabriela%20Nistor.html]
CRITICAL CONTEXTS
Scottish Contexts
Bell, Ian A. 1996. “Imagine Living There: Form and Ideology in Contemporary Scottish Fiction.” In Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, edited by Suzanne Hagemann, 217-233. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Böhnke, Dietmar. 1999. Kelman Writes Back: Literary Politics in the Work of a Scottish Writer. Berlin: Galda & Wilch.
Craig, Cairns. 1993. “Resisting Arrest: James Kelman.” In The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams, edited by Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson, 99-114. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Craig, Cairns, 1999. “Dialect and Dialectics” in The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination, 75-116. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gardiner, Michael. 2006. “Kelman’s Interventions” in From Trocchi to Trainspotting: Scottish Critical Theory Since 1960, 152-77. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gifford, Douglas. 1991. “Discovering Lost Voices.” Books in Scotland 38 (Summer 1991): 1-6.
Kelly, Aaron. 2007. “James Kelman and the Deterritorialisation of Power.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, edited by Berthold Schoene, 175-83. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Macdonald, Graeme. 2002. “A Scottish Subject? Kelman’s Determination.” Études Écossaises 8: 89-111.
Malzahn, Manfred. 1987. “The Industrial Novel.” In The History of Scottish Literature, Vol 4, edited by Cairns Craig, 229-41. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
McMillan, Dorothy. 1995. “Constructed Out of Bewilderment: Stories of Scotland.” In Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Ian A. Bell, 80-99. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
McMunnigall, Alan and Gerry Carruthers, 2002. “Locating Kelman: Glasgow, Scotland and the Commitment to Place.” Edinburgh Review 108: 56-68.
Milne, Drew. 2003. “The Fiction of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh.” In Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew, 158-73. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Scott, Jeremy. 2005. “Talking Back the Centre: Demotic Language in Contemporary Scottish Fiction.” Literature Compass 2.1: 1-26. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00148.x]
Watson, Roderick. 1995. “Alien Voices from the Street: Demotic Modernism in Modern Scots Writing.” In The Yearbook of English Studies (vol 25), edited by Andrew Gurr, 141-55. London: Maney. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3508823]
Zderadickova, Olga. 2004. “Scottish National Identity in the Works of James Kelman.” Theory and Practice in English Studies [Masaryk University, Czech Republic] 2. [http://www.phil.muni.cz/angl/thepes/thepes_02_27.pdf]
voice and narrative Technique
Craig, Cairns. 1993. “Resisting Arrest: James Kelman.” In The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams, edited by Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson, 99-114. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Craig, Cairns. 2010. “Kelman’s Glasgow Sentence.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 75-85. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Freeman, Alan. 1997. “Realism Fucking Realism: The Word on the Street – Kelman, Kennedy and Welsh.” Cencrastus 57 (Summer): 6-7.
Hames, Scott. 2010. “Kelman’s Art-Speech.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 86-98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Leonard, Tom. 2013. “The Locust Tree in Flower, and why it had Difficulty Flowering in Britain.” In Definite Articles: Selected Prose 1973-2012, 74-82. Edinburgh: Word Power Books.
Milne, Drew. 2003. “The Fiction of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh: Accents, Speech and Writing.” In Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew, 158-73. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Murphy, Terence Patrick. 2007. “From Alignment to Commitment: The Early Work of James Kelman.” Cultural Logic 10 (Summer 2007). [Via ResearchGate]
Pawlik, Joanna. 2005. “Speaking Out of Bounds: Pierre Bourdieu and James Kelman’s Challenges to Theories of Enunciation.” Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 25/26.3/1: 131-42.
Spinks, Lee. 2002. “In Juxtaposition to Which: Narrative, System and Subjectivity in the Fiction of James Kelman.” Edinburgh Review 108: 85-105.
Travis, Anna. 2019. “Interior Monologue as Social Critique in James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late.” Études britanniques contemporaines 56. [https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/6857]
Class, realism and Representation
Baker, Simon. 1996. “‘Wee stories with a Working-Class Theme’: The Reimagining of Urban Realism in the Fiction of James Kelman.” In Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, edited by Suzanne Hagemann, 235-50. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Craig, Cairns. 1993. “Resisting Arrest: James Kelman.” In The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams, edited by Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson, 99-114. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Daly, Macdonald. 1993. “Your Average Working Kelman.” Cencrastus 46 (Autumn): 16.
del Valle Alcalá, Roberto. 2016. “The Collapse of Measure: Postmodern Abstraction and Proletarian Flight in James Kelman.” In British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work, 88-110. London: Bloomsbury.
Karl, Alissa G. 2014. “Things Break Apart – James Kelman, Ali Smith and the Neoliberal Novel.” In Reading Capitalist Realism, edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, 64-88. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press.
Kelly, Aaron. 2013. James Kelman: Politics and Aesthetics. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.
Kirk, John. 1999. “Figuring the Dispossessed: Images of the Urban Working Class in the Writing of James Kelman.” English 48.191: 101-116 .[https://doi.org/10.1093/english/48.191.101]
Klaus, H. Gustav. 1989. “James Kelman: A Voice from the Lower Depths of Thatcherite Britain.” London Magazine 29.5-6: 39-48.
Kövesi, Simon. 2005. “James Kelman Margarined: Class, Language and the Avoidance of Butter.” The Drouth 18: 14-53.
Kövesi, Simon. 2007. James Kelman. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Maley, Willy. 1996. “Swearing Blind: Kelman and the Curse of the Working Classes.” Edinburgh Review, 95: 105-112.
Maley, Willy. 2000. “Denizens, Citizens, Tourists and Others: Marginality and Mobility in the Writings of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh.” In City Visions, edited by David Bell and Azzedine Haddour, 60-72. Harlow: Longman.
McCormick, Michael. 1996. “For Jimmy Kelboats.” Chapman 83: 30-33.
Milne, Drew. 1992. “James Kelman: Dialectics of Urbanity.” Swansea Review 13: 393-407.
Mohan, Anupama. 2021. “The Lumpenproletariat and the Itinerary of a Concept: Some Literary Reflections.” Asian Review of World Histories 9: 225-258. [Reads How late alongside Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Herbert (1993) and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), by way of ‘refining Marxian and Fanonian understandings of lumpenproletariat’.]
Rodger, Johnny. 2020. “Where They Are: Language and Place in James Kelman’s Fiction.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, edited by Richard Bradford et al, 159-69. London: Blackwell.
Gender and Masculinity
Hames, Scott. 2007. “Dogged Masculinities: Male Subjectivity and Socialist Despair in Kelman and McIlvanney.” Scottish Studies Review 8.1: 67-87.
Jones, Carole. 2009. “James Kelman – ‘that was him, out of sight’: Masculine Models and Limitations” in Disappearing Men: Gender Disorientation in Scottish Fiction 1979-99, 31-61. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Jones, Carole. 2009. “‘Acting the Part of an Illiterate Savage’: James Kelman and the Question of Postcolonial Masculinity.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45.3: 275-84. [https://doi.org/10.1080/17449850903064724]
Jones, Carole. 2010. “Kelman and Masculinity.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 111-120. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Jones, Carole. 2015. “James Kelman’s Melancholic Politics.” Scottish Literary Review 7.1 (Spring/Summer): 89-112. [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582221]
Knights, Ben. 1999. “‘The Wean and That’: Paternity and Domesticity in The Busconductor Hines”in Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction, 180-94. London: Palgrave.
McMillan, Neil. 2002. “Wilting, or the ‘Poor Wee Boy Syndrome’: Kelman and Masculinity.” Edinburgh Review 108: 41-55.
McNeill, Dougal. 2012. “The Auld Bollocks, or, James Kelman’s Masculine Utopics.” International Review of Scottish Studies 37 [https://doi.org/10.21083/irss.v37i0.1732]
Whyte, Christopher. 1998. “Masculinities in Contemporary Scottish Fiction.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 34.2: 274-85. [https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/XXXIV.3.274]
LINGUISTIC, Stylistic and narratological Approaches
Bittenbender, J.C. 2000. “Silence, Censorship and the Voices of Skaz in the Fiction of James Kelman.” Bucknell University Review 43.2: 150-65.
Corbett, John. 1997. Language and Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (pp. 41-5, 149-61).
Lambert, Iain. 2005. “A Way of Speaking: syntax and lexis as political choice in the fiction of James Kelman”, Bulletin of Tokyo Denki University, Arts and Sciences (December)
Müller, Christine Amanda. 2011. A Glasgow Voice: James Kelman’s Literary Language. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Murphy, Terence Patrick. 2003. “Durational Realism? Voice over Narrative in James Kelman’s An Old Pub near the Angel, and Other Stories.” Journal of Narrative Theory 33.3: 335-355. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/30224596]
Murphy, Terence Patrick. 2006. “‘Getting Rid of that Standard Third Party Narrative Voice’: The Development of James Kelman’s Early Authorial Style.” Language and Literature 15.2: 183-99. [https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963947006063746]
Murphy, Terence Patrick. 2007. “From Alignment to Commitment: The Early Work of James Kelman.” Cultural Logic 10 (Summer 2007). [Via ResearchGate]
Renfrew, Alastair. 1997. “Them and Us? Representation of Speech in Contemporary Scottish Fiction.” In Exploiting Bakhtin, edited by Alastair Renfrew, 15-28. Glasgow: Strathclyde Modern Language Series (no. 2).
Rodger, Liam. 1992. “Tense, Aspect and The Busconductor Hines – the Literary Function of Non-Standard Language in the Fiction of James Kelman.” Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 3: 116-23.
Scott, Jeremy. 2005. “Talking Back the Centre: Demotic Language in Contemporary Scottish Fiction.” Literature Compass 2.1: 1-26. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00148.x]
Scott, Jeremy. 2009. “How Late It Was, How Late for James Kelman’s ‘Folk Novel.’” In The Demotic Voice in Contemporary British Fiction, 92-124. London: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Vice, Sue. 1997. “Dialogism and Reported Speech in James Kelman’s How late it was, how late” in Introducing Bakhtin, 91-111. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Modernist and Existential Contexts
Boxall, Peter. 2010. “Kelman’s Later Novels.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 31-41. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Engledow, Sarah. 2002. “Studying Form: The Off-The-Page Politics of A Chancer.” Edinburgh Review 108: 69-84.
Hames, Scott. 2010. “Kelman’s Art-Speech.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 86-98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Milne, Drew. 1992. “James Kelman: Dialectics of Urbanity.” Swansea Review 13: 393-407.
Nicoll, Laurence. 2000. “‘This is not a nationalist position’: James Kelman’s Existential Voice.” Edinburgh Review 103: 79-84.
Nicoll, Laurence. 2005. “Facticity, or Something Like That: The Novels of James Kelman.” In The Contemporary British Novel, edited by James Acheson and Sarah C.E. Ross, 59-69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nicoll, Laurence. 2010. “Kelman and the Existentialists.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 121-30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Shanks, Paul. 2008. “Joycean Form in James Kelman’s Early Fiction.” In What Rough Beasts: Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium, edited by Shane Alcobia-Murphy, 183-95. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Shanks, Paul. 2008. “The Unnamed Itinerant in Samuel Beckett’s Novellas and James Kelman’s Lean Tales.” Scottish Studies Review 9.2: 109-127.
Travis, Anna. 2019. “Interior Monologue as Social Critique in James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late.” Études britanniques contemporaines 56 [https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/6857]
Comparative AND Postcolonial Perspectives
Gardiner, Michael. 2010. “Kelman and World English.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 99-110. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Gilmour, Rachel. 2020. Bad English: Literature, multilingualism, and the politics of language in contemporary Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press (chapter 1, see also chapter 6).
Hames, Scott. 2009. “Eyeless in Glasgow: James Kelman’s Existential Milton.” Contemporary Literature 50.3: 496-527. [https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.0.0073]
Homberg-Schramm, Jessica. 2018. “James Kelman's Political Poetics in How Late it Was, How Late” and “Childhood Stories of the Scottish Working Class - James Kelman's Kieron Smith, Boy and Des Dillon's Itchycooblue” in “Colonised by Wankers”: Postcolonialism and Contemporary Scottish Fiction, pp. 92-103, 105-13. Cologne: Modern Academic Publishing. [https://d-nb.info/1156461650/34]
Korzeniowska, Aniela. 2010. “James Kelman: A Resistance to Transfer.” International Journal of Scottish Literature 7. [http://www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk/issue7/korzeniowska.htm]
Lambert, Iain. 2011. “This Is Not Sarcasm Believe Me Yours Sincerely: James Kelman, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Amos Tutuola.” In Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives, edited by Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher, 198-209. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lehner, Stefanie. 2011. “‘History Stands So Still, It Gathers Dust’: Mapping Ethical Disjunctures in Contemporary Ireland and Scotland - Patrick McCabe’s The Dead School and James Kelman’s You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free” in Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-Histories. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Macdonald, Graeme. 1996. “Writing Claustrophobia: Zola and Kelman.” Bulletin of the Emile Zola Society 13: 9-20.
McGuire, Matt. 2006. “Dialect(ic) Nationalism? The Fiction of James Kelman and Roddy Doyle.” Scottish Studies Review 7.1: 80-94.
Nicoll, Laurence. 2001. “Gogol’s Overcoat: Kelman Resartus.’ Edinburgh Review 108: 116-22.
Rose, Arthur. 2022. “Recovering Franz Kafka’s Asbestos Factory.” New Literary History 53.1: 59-84. [Explores How late it was, how late and Alan Bennett’s The Insurance Man as responses to Kafka and asbestosis.]
Shanks, Paul. 2008. “Joycean Form in James Kelman’s Early Fiction.” In What Rough Beasts: Irish and Scottish Studies in the New Millennium, edited by Shane Alcobia-Murphy, 183-95. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Shanks, Paul. 2008. “The Unnamed Itinerant in Samuel Beckett’s Novellas and James Kelman’s Lean Tales.” Scottish Studies Review 9.2: 109-127.
Zagratzki, Uwe. 2000. “‘Blues Fell This Morning’: James Kelman’s Scottish Literature and Afro-American Music.” Scottish Literary Journal 27.1 (Spring): 105-117.
Kelman’s Activism and Politics
Carter, Mia. 2010. “Kelman’s Critical and Polemical Writing.” In Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman, edited by Scott Hames, 53-64. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 2003. “James Kelman.” In Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others, 263-65. London: Verso.
Freeman, Alan. 2002. “The Humanist’s Dilemma: A Polemic Against Kelman’s Polemics.” Edinburgh Review 108: 28-40.
Hames, Scott. 2014. “Scottish Literature, Devolution, and the Fetish of Representation.” Bottle Imp Supplement 1.
[https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2014/03/scottish-literature-devolution-and-the-fetish-of-representation/]
Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa and Willy Maley. 2002. “Committing to Kelman: the Art of Integrity and the Politics of Dissent.” Edinburgh Review 108: 22-27.
Klaus, H. Gustav. 2005. “Anti-Authoritarianism in the Later Fiction of James Kelman.” In “To Hell with Culture”: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, edited by H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, 162-177. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Miller, Mitch and Johnny Rodger. 2011. The Red Cockatoo: James Kelman and the Art of Commitment. Dingwall, Ross-shire: Sandstone Press.
Miller, Mitch and Johnny Rodger. 2012. “The Writer as Tactician: The Everyday Practice of James Kelman.” Scottish Literary Review 4.1: 151-68.
Miller, Mitch and Johnny Rodger. 2013. “Strange Currencies: Margaret Thatcher and James Kelman as Two Faces of the Globalisation Coin.” Scottish Affairs 83.1: 71-90.
Neil, Ken. 2012. “Politics Tactics Pragmatic Antics: James Kelman’s Everyday Strategy.” The Drouth 42: 26-34. [http://radar.gsa.ac.uk/2943/1/PoliticsTacticsPragmaticAntics2012.pdf]
Nicoll, Laurence. 2000. “‘This is not a nationalist position’: James Kelman’s Existential Voice.” Edinburgh Review 103: 79-84.