Honors Theses
Date of Award
2012
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Judson (Jay) Watson
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
In this thesis, I compare the fiction of Mississippi author Larry Brown and Scottish author Irvine Welsh, specifically in how they represent their respective regions’ working classes. The project concerns the genre of working-class fiction in both the American South and Scotland, as well as the general fields of Southern and Scottish contemporary fiction. The groundwork for this thesis began when I read Welsh’s Trainspotting while studying at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland during the spring of 2011.1 wanted to explore why Welsh’s working-class representations felt so similar to the Southern fiction I read at the University of Mississippi, and eventually decided his writing most directly resembled the fiction of Larry Brown, an author from Mississippi. I researched the literary histories of American and British working-class fiction to contextualize the authors’ place in these traditions at the end of the twentieth century. I searched for similarities and differences between the two histories in an effort to find out why Brown and Welsh eventually wrote comparable representations,especially given their different geographic settings and cultures. In studying the fiction, I decided to compare several works from Brown with Welsh’s Trainspotting, since the novel covered a variety of issues found across Brown’s body of work. I articulate three thematic comparisons between the two writers in the first chapter: their tendency to characterize their working-classes as “underclasses,” their emphasis on substance abuse, and their focus on non-traditional working families. In the following chapters, I argue that the two major differences between the wTiters - their separate geographic settings and their different uses of vernacular language - actually point to similar sensibilities at work in their fiction. In chapter two, I argue that their settings of Scotland and Mississippi are related because they are both geographic peripheries. In chapter three, I argue that Brown and Welsh’s “different” linguistic choices react to their literar}^ histories in the same manner and achieve a similar “empowering’' effect. I ultimately found that it was entirely possible to find specific ways in which Brown and Welsh are connected, and that my initial whim to connect Welsh to Southern writing has an arguable basis.
Recommended Citation
Patterson, Christopher Paul, "On the Fringes of Peripheries: A Comparison of the Working-Class Representations of Larry Brown and Irvine Welsh" (2012). Honors Theses. 2392.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/2392
Accessibility Status
Searchable text