Understanding violence in the contemporary fiction of Irvine Welsh

It is important to study the literature of foreign cultures because doing so not only provides insight into other lifestyles, but also because it helps us understand our place in our own society as well as our place in the world around us. Literature provides an avenue for which individuals learn to sympathize or relate in some other way to people and cultures that they might otherwise never know. It does this by introducing the reader to a specific character in a specific place and time. The reader inevitably forms some kind of connection, whether positive or negative, with the text. I use the word foreign very loosely in this analysis. This thesis serves as an attempt to understand Irvine Welsh’s use of violence in Marabou Stork Nightmares. Irvine Welsh is a Scottish writer and is, obviously, foreign in relationship to me as an American reader. However, since the setting of this novel places the reader in the inner city drug culture of Edinburgh, that particular lifestyle is also foreign in the sense that is very unfamiliar to some, but not all, readers. When it comes to Irvine Welsh’s literature, I am interested primarily in the evolution and critique of violence against women and against developing nations. This thesis is an exploration of those very ideas