Matthew Hart

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
matthart@english.upenn.edu

 

Review of: Irvine Welsh, Glue.New York: Norton, 2002.

 

There’s a passage in Bill Buford’s celebrated account of football violence, Among the Thugs, that is relevant to the question of Irvine Welsh’s Scottishness. Buford is on the Italian island of Sardinia, amidst a rioting crowd of hooligan inglesi, fleeing from the police in the aftermath of a 1990 World Cup match between England and Holland:

 

Then I collided with the people near me. Someone had brought the crowd to a stop. I didn’t understand why: the police were behind us; they would appear at any moment. Someone then shouted that we were all English. Why were we running? The English don’t run…. And so it went on. Having fled in panic, some of the supporters would then remember that they were English and that this was important, and they would remind the others that they too were English, and that this was also important, and, with a renewed sense of national identity, they would come abruptly to a halt, turn around, and charge the Italian police. (Buford 296)

 

Questions of national identity are at the center of Buford’s book. An American, writing about British football, he observes that hooliganism runs through concentric circles of club, city, caste, and country. But given that the ne plus ultra of football violence is the foreign campaign–the “taking” of a Continental city–Buford’s analysis necessarily privileges the great circle of nationalism: “The effect was immediate: these were no longer supporters of Manchester United; they were now defenders of the English nation. They had ceased to be Mancunians; in an instant, their origins had, blotterlike, spread from one dot on the map of the country to the entire map itself” (38-9). Hooliganism has been described as “the English disease.” And so, in Among the Thugs, football violence becomes the privileged sociological lens through which to view the post-industrial unmaking of the English working class: “a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt social habits” (262).

 

Substitute “Scotland” for “England” and Buford’s dystopic sociology will serve as a fair entrance-point to the world of Irvine Welsh’s Glue, a novel with much to say about football, violence, “codes of maleness,” and the fate of four working-class men as they come to adulthood during the 1980s and ’90s. Of course, it would be foolish to link Buford and Welsh without some strong sense of the difference between Scottish and English class and sporting cultures.¹ What is more significant, however, is that both Glue and Among the Thugs are texts trapped endlessly between national and “post-national” interpretive and structural imperatives. For if Buford’s Manchester United fans fill out their identities, “blotterlike,” to color the entire map of England, then it is also true that this is a nationalism subject to some of the most profoundly internationalizing forces in the contemporary world. The plots of both texts depend fundamentally on mass international travel: budget airlines, the package tour, and the Continental “weekender.” Both texts are written under the sign of the 1992 Maastricht treaty, which abolished immigration and labor controls between most European countries, creating a class of “Eurotrash” itinerants–both poor and wealthy–and giving fits to Continental policemen, struggling to separate law-abiding vacationers from an impossible-to-define “hooligan element.” Finally, both hooligans and literary cognoscenti revel in the recent unprecedented expansion in European and international cultural events, whether Glasgow Celtic vs. Juventus of Torino or a city-break to the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. This last phenomenon gets great comic treatment in Glue, when Welsh’s protagonists–in Munich for the Oktoberfest beer festival–crash a cultural reception of the “Munich-Edinburgh Twin Cities Committee.”

 

Though he barely addresses it outright, the Europeanization of England is the ever-present determining context for Buford’s narratives. The single market is a political economy that his motley crew of electricians and skinheads struggles to comprehend, yet knows intimately: “I thought: this is a parody of the holiday abroad. Except that it wasn’t a parody. This was the holiday abroad. Their dads, they kept telling me, never had a chance to see the world like this” (Buford 54). For Welsh, and Glue, the tensions between nation and post-nation are more complicated, in part because of the long struggle between Scottish nationalists and an Anglocentric cultural and political elite; for whereas the “Other” of English nationalism has usually been found across the Channel, the Scottish have always found their antagonists closer to home.² But such tensions are also due to Welsh’s increasingly certain status as a representative Scottish author–a celebrity of Scottishness whose every character, setting, and incident will be put through the mincer of a cultural media which demands authentic national types even as it writes endless obituaries for the idea of the nation itself.

 

The worldwide success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series means that Welsh is no longer the best-selling novelist identified with Edinburgh but, adolescent wizards aside, no other Scottish writer has equivalent celebrity and none has gone so far to upset common perceptions of Scotland as a land of heather and history. Welsh has often appeared in the major newspapers and magazines as an avatar of a new, harsh, and dole-queue-glamorous Scottishness. He is a twofold prophet, national and international at once: a spokesperson for post-Thatcherite parochial youth culture, buoyed up by the global success of the scene that he documents and promotes. Welsh upsets the genteel notions of tartan traditionalists yet, inevitably, the new Scotland he has anatomized over the last decade is immediately marketable as a new national type, his vision of a growing but underrepresented subculture coming to dominate, for a while, the calcified history of Old Caledonia. The irony is that Trainspotting, a novel that scorns “ninety minute patriotism”–the duration of an international football match–survives in the popular mind as a portable symbol of Scotland. What price Renton’s (self-)loathing for a nation that let itself be “colonized by wankers”?

 

Glue is the first Welsh novel since the frankly awful Filth. Its main advance over that abortive satire on the police is that Welsh has toned down some of the overly psychologized experiments in typography and narrative form that worked well in the short stories of The Acid House but never synthesized with the claustrophobic character-study at the heart of Filth. Glue has all the drugs-‘n-sex-‘n-violence of any Welsh tome, but tries less hard to be obviously literary. It is the longest Welsh novel, yet little is wasted; it has generational ambitions–being the life story of four men, set in Scotland, Germany and Australia–but never loses sight of its roots in tribal, parochial, friendships. Welsh is very much a popular author, in literary as well as commercial terms. Besides being full of black-hearted belly laughs, the great strength of Welsh’s best stories is that they bring the traditional values of narrative prose–revealing character through action and dialogue–to a proletarian and pop-cultural scene badly in need of the kind of unsanctimonious comedy and pathos at which he excels. Here’s Gally, the tragic anti-hero of Glue, in bed with Sharon, having recently discovered that he’s HIV-positive:

 

When she started kissing ays deeply ah thoat for ah while ah wis somebody else. Then it came back tae ays exactly who ah wis. Ah telt her she wis hingin aboot wi rubbish, n ah included maself in that, n told her she wis better thin that and she should sort it oot. (192)

 

Gally is the misfit, the bad luck charm; contracting HIV is not even the end of his Job-like litany of misfortune. There’s something unbelievable–melodramatic and formulaic–about so much misery and mischance: Gally is the original scapegoat, the communal raw nerve. But there’s also real pathos in his story and narration: a tenderness and insight that are rarely mawkish and which derive in large part from Welsh’s suturing of idiom and consciousness. When Sharon finally understands why Gally won’t have sex with her, she reveals her own secret:

 

Her sweaty face pulled away fae mines and came intae view.–It’s awright… disnae matter. Ah sortay guessed. Ah thoat ye kent: ah’m like that n aw, she told me with a mischievous wee smile.

 

There wis no fear in her eyes. None at all. It was like she was talkin aboot bein in the fuckin Masons or something. It put the shits up me. Ah goat up, went through, and sat cross-legged in the chair, lookin at ma crossbow oan the waw. (193)

 

Gally has only ever wanted to be “somebody else” and the last thing he desires is to hear the words “ah’m like that n aw.” Such a blank and fearless statement of affinity can only ever “put the shits” up a man with such depths of self-loathing and denial. Still, there’s time for a joke at the expense of Masons–and so, by extension, all Protestants and fans of Glasgow Rangers F.C. Reading these passages, it helps to link the paradox of Welsh’s Scots to the paradox of Gally’s mind. Both are decidedly parochial, forged out of a restricted vocabulary. But they are also surprisingly rich, endlessly comic and pathetic–mined from some cosmic source of narrative rogues and dialect one-liners.

 

Welsh is not the only Scottish author writing in vernacular language, but he’s among the very few with anything like a mass audience. It’s difficult to know whether non-Scottish readers come to Welsh because of his Scots, or in spite of it. It is a problem that bothers the American media in particular.³ Here’s a comical exchange from a 1998 Time interview with Welsh; the question of language bleeds, inevitably, into the question of audience and sales:

 

Q: Are you afraid that you have fewer American readers than you would if you didn’t write in Scottish dialect?
A: Yeah, I’m doing a reading tonight, and nobody’s going to understand a word.
Q: I haven’t understood anything you’ve said. I’m going to have to make most of it up. Oh, well, thanks anyway. (Stein)

 

Either way, Welsh’s work draws attention to its Scottishness as a matter of language; as always, writing in Scots begs very basic questions of writing itself. Is using the “national” tongue a necessarily nationalist gesture? Is Anglophone Scottish writing a contradiction in terms? And in Scotland, which is the national tongue anyway? Is it Scots, the traditional language of the Lowlands, derived from Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon? And if so, shall we prefer Welsh’s Edinburgh vernacular to, say, the Glasgow Scots of James Kelman’s Booker-winning How Late It Was How Late? If we privilege longevity over popularity, shall we fasten on the Scottish Gaelic of the Highlands and western islands? And there are other alternatives, ancient and modern: Hugh MacDiarmid fused medieval Scots and contemporary coinage with the fruits of 19th-century etymological research, creating a literary language of a mobile and synthetic kind; Robert Alan Jamieson has written a series of novels and short stories which collectively mine and record the mixed Scandic-Scots vernacular of Sanni communities in the Shetland Isles of the far north.

 

And what of English, that thousand-pound gorilla? Almost every Scottish author since the Reformation has written in English, to greater or lesser degree–and usually greater. Linguists can identify multiple dialects of Scottish English, including a Scottish Standard English to set against the dialect of the southern metropolis; English has been the language of church, court, and school for over 400 years; and so for every writer who talks of escaping the shadow of Anglophone cultural authority, there’s another who’ll celebrate the wholesale Scottishing of British English–a language confidently mastered and manipulated by Scottish writers from Burns (Robbie) to Burns (Gordon). It’s a sociological fact one can trace through the Scottish education system, where a side-effect of programmatic Anglophonization was a level of popular literacy far higher than in the linguistically homogeneous south. Scottish intellectuals likewise take pride in the fact that the academic study of English language and literature was pioneered in Scotland’s ancient universities. In the twentieth century these Scottish universities blazed a trail in the revivification of Scottish literature; in the eighteenth, they gave witness to “The Scottish Invention of English Literature.”⁴

 

There are solid historical reasons for this duality. Cairns Craig, the general editor of the standard multi-volume history of Scottish literature, talks of Scottish literature existing “between cultures rather than within a culture” (3). Scottish writing necessarily partakes of the postcolonial politics that propels African writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o to reject the language of Empire. But the Scottish situation is peculiar because “Scotland was an active partner in the extension of Empire that made English a world language, while at the same time, in its own linguistic experience, it shared the experience of the colonised” (Craig 5). This is a reality that Welsh recognizes: “I really like standard English but it is an administrative language, an imperialist language.” Nevertheless, his abandonment of the standard-English first drafts of Trainspotting is a decision he justifies in aesthetic, rather than wholeheartedly political terms: “It’s not very funky” (O’Shea and Shapiro). While the sometimes-hostile press reaction to Welsh’s Scots reminds him of his political affinity with a vernacular writer like Kelman, this is one more author who wants to have his Anglophone cake and eat it too.

 

Welsh’s decision to write much of his fiction in the argot of the Edinburgh streets and schemes resurrects these historical and linguistic questions, now spun and counter-spun by the political economics of market globalization.⁵ More than anything, his commercial success testifies to the groundbreaking work done since MacDiarmid inaugurated the modernist “Scottish Renaissance” program of revivifying the vernacular in the 1920s. But what of Welsh’s Scots? What are its literary qualities? In the first place, his use of Edinburgh Scots is not especially innovative. His dialogue has a satirical bite missing from the late Romantic-era novels of James Hogg and Walter Scott, but doesn’t add much more to their technical example, using Scots largely as an indicator of social standing. Instead of the literate shepherd who betrays his peasant origins when he opens his mouth, meet the Pilton schemie, his Edinburgh accent flashing through the neutral English narration of “The Acid House”:

 

Then the rain came: at first a few warning spits, followed by a hollow explosion of thunder in the sky. Coco saw a flash of lightning where his glowing vision had been and although unnerved in a different way, he breathed a sigh of relief that his strange sighting had been superseded by more earthly phenomena. Ah wis crazy tae drop that second tab ay acid. The visuals ur something else. (Welsh, Acid House 153)

 

In “The Acid House” working class characters speak Edinburgh Scots, while the narrator takes on the standard English of the bourgeois citizens who have, through a coincidence of lightning and LSD, given birth to a baby with the mind of a football hooligan: “This is fuckin too radge, man, Andy conceded,–cannae handle aw this shite, eh” (167). Throughout Welsh’s writing, Scots is identified with spoken language–if not dialogue then interior monologue, the speech of the thinking mind. More often than not, the two registers are drawn together. In the opening of Glue, a man is leaving his wife and family, nervous during this last public outing as a nuclear unit:

 

Henry Lawson shuffled around to check who’d heard. Met one nosy gape with a hard stare until it averted. Two old fuckers, a couple. Interfering auld bastards. Speaking through his teeth, in a strained whisper he said to her,–Ah’ve telt ye, they’ll be well looked eftir. Ah’ve fuckin well telt ye that. Ma ain fuckin bairns, he snapped at her, the tendons in his neck taut. (6)

 

The narrative slides toward Scots as it moves toward Henry’s speech. The passage opens with two relatively standard English sentences, plainly descriptive; but by the third sentence the narrative point-of-view is Henry’s–though we remain in standard English, there’s no doubt about who’s calling whom an “old fucker.” The next sentence even more plainly belongs to Henry; and as we move closer to his next vocalized thought, the English word “old” mutates into the Scottish “auld.” The narrator needs just one more descriptive connector before Henry’s self-justifying rage can be given full throttle in the vernacular. As in much purportedly vernacular fiction, third-person omniscience requires the (seeming) authority and (seeming) transparency of administrative English, while Scots marks a register that is simultaneously social and subjective.

 

It would be a mistake, however, to confuse the innately realist signifying-effect of Scots dialogue with a similar commitment to naturalist realism–telling it like it is, in the words of the street. According to The Guardian newspaper, the 2002 Edinburgh Book Festival saw Ronald Frame lump Welsh’s writing among the “cliched brand of novels celebrating such dark subjects as cannibalism, necrophilia and sado-masochism.” Frame has been joined in the attack by the poet Kenneth White, who accuses Welsh of serving-up the “remains of last night’s fish supper, sauced up with sordid naturalism.” But this is sour-faced and misplaced criticism. Welsh is no “dirty realist” after the fashion of Americans like Raymond Carver, still less some sort of S&M Zola. As he says in response to Frame and White, “I’ve never thought of myself as a realist. I don’t think that talking tapeworms and squirrels is all that realistic” (qtd. in Gibbons). Judging by his published remarks, Welsh’s chosen American precursor is William S. Burroughs, another prophet of chemical communities; but Welsh’s writing is most fully in the tradition of the “Caledonian Antisyzygy,” as identified by G. Gregory Smith in 1919. According to Smith, Scottish literature is marked by one overweening characteristic: the union of opposites such as the known and unknown, quotidian and fantastic, standard and vernacular, genteel and vulgar. This involves a linguistic, stylistic, and generic commitment to existing–as MacDiarmid put it–“Whaur extremes meet” (87). Welsh’s writing is nothing if not extreme: an always raw collage of generic mixing, surrealist fantasy, everyday bother, and hallucinatory black humor.⁶

 

And yet, despite the omnipresent excesses of Welsh’s prose, Glue is largely constructed around friendships and human encounters. It boasts no talking tapeworms and its realism is interrupted not so much by fantasy and hallucination but by the sense that we’ve heard these stories before. The main characters are novel versions of familiar types: Gally, the victim of a schoolyard code of Omerta that he upholds but never controls; Billy, the loner who finds success and single-mindedness in sports and business; Juice Terry, hapless burglar, incorrigible dole-ite, and awesomely successful Don Juan; and Carl, a dreamer, lost in music and the excesses of life as an international DJ. As in most coming-of-age narratives, these are lives we can chart on mirror-image x/y graphs: a rising line on the graph marking social standing almost inevitably implies a fall in the chart that grades happiness, contentment, and the good feelings of friends left behind. It’s not that Glue is unoriginal but that its familiarity moves it in the direction of urban folklore, so that even the novel’s more improbable moments, like Terry’s night out with an American R-‘n’-B star, read like excursions into a well-established narrative sociology. In the case of the Sherman chanteuse,⁷ the thematics of high versus low cultures is a direct repeat from the brilliant short story “Where the Debris Meets the Sea.” In that ironic set-piece, Kim Basinger, Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Victoria Principal lust over magazines stuffed full with working-class Edinburgh man-meat: “A pile of glossy magazines lay on a large black coffee table. They bore such titles as Wide-o, Scheme Scene and Bevvy Merchants. Madonna flicked idly through the magazine called Radge, coming to an abrupt halt as her eyes fastened on the pallid figure of Deek Prentice, resplendent in purple, aqua and black shell-suit.” This abrupt reversal in the sexual economy of pop culture is cemented by Welsh’s decision to make his Hollywood stars speak broad Scots: “‘We’ll nivir go tae fuckin’ Leith!’ Kim said, in a tone of scornful dismissal. ‘Yous are fuckin’ dreamin'” (Welsh, Acid House 87-88, 92).

 

Some reviewers have interpreted such echoes as evidence of repetition. Tired of tales told from nightclubs and housing schemes, reviewers have begun to dismiss Welsh as a one-trick pony. I generally enjoy the folkloric repetition that is increasingly a part of Welsh’s fiction–fans of serial fiction will be pleased to hear that he is penning a sequel to Trainspotting–and despite all the excess of a book like Glue the pleasures it gives are ultimately ones of recognition, as when the protagonists of earlier novels show up in cameo roles. Glue‘s argot and setting are familiar by now. The individual lives of the four friends are given structure by their similar movement out-and-back–an actual or metaphorical journey away, and the journey home. Glue ends with homecomings, both literal and symbolic, where an Oedipal politics of masculinity and maturation tries to crowd-out the vicissitudes of the nation. It closes with the death of one character’s father, shared grief mending damaged friendships. The dead man was the symbolic father of the group, an apologist for youth and the author of their childhood code of silence and loyalty. By closing with this death, Glue‘s narrative takes on a generational and patrilineal shape.

 

One can see Welsh, and perhaps his audience, getting older. More seriously, we can see how the strength of Welsh’s fiction, and perhaps the source of its greatest popular appeal, is its study of the formation and deformation of tribal groups, as familial, musical, and pharmacological subcultures come to dominate–and now find some accommodation–in their struggle with (and within) traditional allegiances of class and nation. Trainspotting, for instance, is much more than days-in-the-life of a group of smack addicts: it documents the breakdown of the social and cultural bonds made by shared experiences of childhood, drugs, city, and nation. Like the middle section of Glue, its narrative charts the movement from punk rock and heroin to techno and MDMA. This cultural movement is itself predicated on a simultaneous physical movement away from the symbolic geography of the Scottish nation. Renton escapes first to London and the burgeoning club scene, then finally into European anonymity, flush with the drug money he stole from his friends, heading for a life outside of Scotland and the provinciality of its capital city. One can, it should be admitted, read even Renton’s narrative as a national allegory–Welsh’s use of Scots makes that almost inevitable. And despite its ultimately Oedipal structure, it’s clear that Welsh also sees Glue as an allegory of the nation–one that, this time, ends happily in New Caledonia, friends gathered round the big multi-cultural mixing desk of devolutionary Scotland.

 

Welsh wants to have it both ways; Scotland, that antisyzygetical nation, insists on it. The Scotland that we see in Glue is both newly confident and newly irrelevant. Welsh’s characters are unabashed national stereotypes, yet we see them abroad in both mind and place, drawn to the international affinities of music, sport, and pharmaceuticals. Welsh has so far shown no sign of wanting to escape the triple Scottishness of language, setting, and type; but the Scotland he portrays is unimaginable without other criss-crossing elective affinities, running counter to the claims of the nation. In Glue, the nation is non-negotiable: a monument to modernity that postmodern chancers can neither overcome nor gainsay. A book like Glue, so full of the contradictions of international culture, nevertheless appears as a local affirmation of Tom Nairn’s global formula: “Blessing and curse together, nationality is simply the fate of modernity” (199).⁸ Scotland, its languages, its unknown destiny in the marketplace of nations and ethnicities, is a fundamental ingredient in the “glue” that holds these characters, and these pages, together. That we come to know such stickiness by watching its interaction with various global solvents shouldn’t surprise us. Didn’t the kids invent huffing? Didn’t they know what they were doing?

 

Notes

 

1. For example, Scottish football fans are very proud of their public difference from English supporters, especially when traveling abroad for international matches. While domestic Scottish games have seen their fair share of violence (witness Welsh’s many pages on the über-hooligans of Edinburgh’s Hibernian FC) traveling fans of the Scottish national team have styled themselves as the drunken but ultimately avuncular “Tartan Army.” The booze and military metaphors remain the same, but the relations between fans, police, foreign and local governments, and national public sentiment are quite different.

 

2. Contrast, for instance, the different stances of English and Scottish political nationalists toward the question of E.U. federation. For Scottish nationalists, the slogan “Independence in Europe” represents the desire to root small-nation autarky within transnational (constitutional, cultural, and economic) structures and institutions. Current English nationalism is, on the contrary, largely of the xenophobic, “Eurosceptic” kind. This contemporary phenomenon is more interesting when considered next to Linda Colley’s argument that an Anglo-Scottish “British” identity was made possible, in part, by the common threat to England and Scotland from Napoleonic and Catholic France.

 

3. The first American edition of Trainspotting (New York: Norton, 1996) printed a glossary of Scottish phrases not included in the original UK edition (London: Minerva, 1994). This troubles an interviewer for the U.S. online magazine, Feed: “Reading Trainspotting, at first you feel sort of alienated and distanced by the phonetic spellings, but after about five pages you really get into it, the language. But when the glossary of Scottish terms came out for the American edition it almost seemed to turn that language into a gimmick for Americans.” See O’Shea and Shapiro’s “RE: Irvine Welsh: William O’Shea and Deborah Shapiro Talk to the Author of Trainspotting about Populist Literature, the Drug Novel, and Surviving the Millennium.”

 

4. See Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature.

 

5. For example, Danny Boyle’s 1996 Miramax film of Trainspotting becomes an international success and a text of archetypal modern Scottishness, in part because of its use of vernacular language; but the pop culture it does so much to celebrate is marked by cosmopolitan eclecticism–equal parts Sean Connery and Iggy Pop, with seemingly no tension between them. The movie of the film gains much attention for its depiction of post-industrial Scotland, partly because of the drug use, partly because of the language. But the film’s greatest marketing push comes from its brilliantly selected soundtrack, full of English Brit-poppers, European dance music, and American punk. Despite the insistently national focus of the press, the demographic assumed by the soundtrack is definitively post-national in the question of marketing and musical taste.

 

6. There is much to distinguish Welsh from MacDiarmid, despite their common situation as writers made famous by Scots and Scottishness; the generalized horizon of Smith’s antisyzygy no doubt obscures as much as it reveals. Nevertheless, they share a common scabrous and antinomian quality, best found perhaps in a fuller version of the above quotation. The narrator of MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle proudly declares that he will “ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur / Extremes meet–it’s the only way I ken / To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt” (87).

 

7. “Sherman” is one of Welsh’s favorite pieces of rhyming slang, a form of demotic that Edinburgh Scots have perfected after the Cockney example. “Sherman” means “American,” deriving from “Sherman Tank,” which rhymes, of course, with “Yank.” Welsh’s rhyming slang invariably follows this kind of abbreviation and homophonic substitution–arguably the defining characteristics of traditional rhyming slang. The beauty of this argot lies in the distance between the slang-word and its referent. Thus, “Manto” from “Mantovani,” meaning “bit of fanny.”

 

8. For a useful critique of Nairn’s fatalistic conjunction of modernity and nationality, see Mulhern (58-61).

Works Cited

 

• Buford, Bill. Among the Thugs. New York: Vintage, 1993.
• Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992.
• Craig, Cairns, ed. The History of Scottish Literature, Vol 4: Twentieth Century Scottish Literature. 4 Vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1988.
• Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
• Gibbons, Fiachra. “Eight Years on from Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh Pens the Sequel: Porno.” The Guardian 22 Aug. 2002 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,540572,00.html>.
• MacDiarmid, Hugh. Collected Poems, Vol. 1. 2 vols. Michael Grieve & W. R. Aitken, eds. London: Penguin, 1985.
• Mulhern, Francis. “Britain After Nairn.” New Left Review 5 (Sep.-Oct. 2000): 53-66.
• Nairn, Tom. After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland. London: Granta, 2000.
• O’Shea, William, and Deborah Shapiro. “RE: Irvine Welsh: William O’Shea and Deborah Shapiro Talk to the Author of Trainspotting about Populist Literature, the Drug Novel, and Surviving the Millennium.” Feed 3 Sep. 1999.
• Smith, G. Gregory. Scottish Literature: Character and Influence. London: MacMillan, 1919.
• Stein, Joel. “Irvine Welsh: The Arts/Q+A.” Time 28 Sep. 1998 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980928/the_arts.q_a.irvine_wel32a.html>.
• Welsh, Irvine. The Acid House. New York: Norton, 1994.
• —. Trainspotting. New York: Norton, 1996.