49
The Banality of Violence in A  L  Kennedy’s 
Early Short Stories
Ema Jelínková
Abstract
The present paper adapts Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil to illustrate the 
banality of a specific manifestation of evil, which is violence, as it is presented in the early 
short stories of A. L. Kennedy. Selected stories from Kennedy’s first two collections, Night 
Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990) and Now that You’re Back (1994), are analysed 
to show that, like Arendt, Kennedy does not dismiss the perpetrators of violent acts as 
sadistic monsters but rather perceives them in their complexity as human beings who 
may commit inhuman crimes, yet cannot be explained away easily as less than human. 
Kennedy’s point about the banality of violence – banality in the sense of commonness 
or ordinariness, not in the sense of triviality – is reinforced by her preoccupation with 
ordinary characters leading mundane lives, whose humdrum existence is disrupted by un-
expected, though typically unexceptional, circumstances. Lacking the capacity or skill to 
cope by non-violent means, Kennedy’s characters resort to violence in a perverted attempt 
to come to terms with the uncertainty of life and to express in a physical manner what 
they cannot express in language.
Keywords: A. L. Kennedy; Scottish literature; women’s writing; banality of evil; violence
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09-32Kennedy A.L.
DOI: 10.4312/an.53.1-2.49-59
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50 Ema JElínková CONTEXTUALISING A  L  KENNEDY: A SCOTTISH WOMAN 
WRITER?
We have small lives, easily lost in foreign droughts, or famines; the occasional 
incendiary incident, or a wall of pale faces, crushed against grillwork, one Sat-
urday afternoon in Spring. This is not enough.
—A. L. Kennedy, “Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains”  
(Kennedy, Night 34)
A. L. Kennedy (b. 1965) embarked on her literary career at the height of what is 
retrospectively known as the second Scottish literary renaissance, which was initi-
ated by the 1981 publication of Lanark: A Life in Four Books, a monumental novel 
from the pen and pencil of Alasdair Gray (b. 1934), the doyen of Scottish letters 
as well as an illustrator, painter and muralist. In his seminal novel, accompanied by 
his own black-and-white illustrations, Gray bemoans the absence of a continuous 
Scottish cultural tradition worth the name in creative writing and otherwise:
Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the 
first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, 
history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the 
inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, 
the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting 
streets. . . . Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad 
novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to our-
selves. (Gray 243)
While Gray’s complaint bore some relevance at the time of its writing, when the 
Scottish literary heritage rested on the fame of several individuals considered in 
isolation – notably Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a 
few others – and appeared to lack in continuity as much as contemporaneousness, 
originality and memorability, now the tables have turned and it is also owing to 
the significant contribution of Alasdair Gray that Scottish writing started to find 
its own unique direction(s) at the end of the twentieth century. 
By their own admission, the Scots have struggled to define a national identity 
on which to build an artistic tradition as a consequence of Scotland’s historical 
development as a stateless nation since the 1707 Act of Union, which merged 
the formerly separate kingdoms of Scotland and England into what is now the 
United Kingdom. More than three hundred years, two major Jacobite uprisings, 
two devolution referenda and one independence referendum later – with a second 
independence referendum currently under consideration – the year 1707 is by 
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51 The Banality of Violence in A. L. Kennedy’s Early Short Stories
no means a long-forgotten history. That is, not for Scotland, which has experi-
enced from the beginning of its difficult relationship with England the feeling 
that the wealthier, more powerful, and more influential south of Britain perceives 
and treats the Scottish as inferior, inconsequential and impoverished in terms of 
not only economic but also social and cultural development. 
How the national identity issue inevitably impacts on both the production and 
reception of Scottish literature is illustrated in A. L. Kennedy’s characteristically 
evasive response in an interview when the obligatory question about the Scottish 
character of her work comes up: 
I use the language that I use, which has Scottish-isms, Scottish rhythms in it, 
but that’s not me making a point, that’s where I come from. That’s the frustrat-
ing thing, people down here will say: “What’s it like being a Scottish writer?” 
and I’ll say: “I don’t know, I’ve never been anything else.” I’m not being awk-
ward, but it’s a question you don’t get asked if you’re from London. (Kennedy 
qtd. in Merritt 13)
Kennedy notoriously eschews the limitations imposed by labels and the confines 
enforced by neat definitions but no matter how she rejects the idea of “making a 
point” out of the fact that she happens to be Scottish, she cannot avoid the pecu-
liarities of the Scottish language, character and experience seeping in throughout 
her work. Despite the sheer precariousness of any attempts to capture the common 
characteristics of the continuously living, organically evolving and spontaneously 
transmuting body of a nation’s literature, it may be helpful to tentatively offer a 
snapshot of the most prominent features that A. L. Kennedy shares with many 
of her contemporaries as well as with some of her predecessors. What appears to 
be a distinctly Scottish strain in Kennedy’s writing involves her frequent focus 
on troubled identities and the tension between one’s private personality versus 
one’s public persona—which is the quintessential Scottish theme reaching back 
to Robert Louis Stevenson’s foundational novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr 
Hyde (1886) – and, furthermore, her explorations of the intricate interdependence 
of the individual and the nation, her preference for dark, disturbing, even perverse 
subject matter and her penchant for balancing out even the grimmest subject with 
a paradoxically life-affirming gallows humour. Ultimately, as Kaye Mitchell puts 
it, Kennedy’s texts “all contribute to and disseminate some idea of ‘Scotland’ and 
‘Scottishness’, regardless of her desire for her writing to be judged independent of 
considerations of national identity” (Mitchell 45).
Scottish women writers arguably create under the pressure of the historical 
double bind as representatives of a dispossessed nation and members of the op-
pressed second sex, in Simone de Beauvoir’s terms: 
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52 Ema JElínková For man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the com-
mon use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman repre-
sents only the negative. . . . She is defined and differentiated with reference to 
man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as op-
posed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other. 
(de Beauvoir 15–16)
The marginalisation, dismissal or outright omission of women’s experience as in -
consequential has been particularly prevalent in Scotland’s culture, which tends to 
present itself deliberately as hypermasculine – epitomised in the popular imagi-
nation by the face-painted, dishevelled and bloodied Mel Gibson defiantly yelling 
“Freedom!” with his last breath as he plays the historical Scottish warrior William 
Wallace in the blockbuster Braveheart (1995). A. L. Kennedy’s fellow-Scottish 
woman writer, Janice Galloway (b. 1955), pays tribute to the inspiring, energising 
and even mobilising influence of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, where she discovered, in 
her own words, “a voice that offered me something freeing” (Galloway 195), which 
was the much-needed impetus that galvanised not only Galloway but arguably a 
whole generation of emergent writers of either sex in a world where the “so-called 
women’s issues are still regarded as deviant, add-on, extra. Not the Big Picture,” 
Galloway contends (Galloway qtd. in March, “Galloway” 85). 
Kennedy firmly rejects the restrictive “woman writer” label as well as the even 
more definitive “feminist” label, along with any other neat categories that would 
reduce her work into an exercise in promoting a particular preset agenda. “I’ve 
certainly had feminists come to my readings and walk out,” she recounts. “I think 
they came expecting me to be someone who conforms to their agenda. No guy 
ever does a reading and has a whole load of guys at the back standing up and say-
ing, ‘why aren’t you redefining maleness?’” Kennedy argues against the stereotypi-
cal assumption that “to be a female writer you must be something else too” (Ken-
nedy qtd. in March, “Kennedy” 107). While it certainly holds true that Kennedy 
does not pursue any immediately identifiable ideological purpose or didactic goal, 
especially her early writings manifest unmistakably female sensibilities – even 
without assuming any apparent moral stance – which are not paralleled in any 
other works by her “default” male fellow-writers. 
When pressed to comment on the often harsh plights of the disempowered, 
dispossessed, and disaffected female characters in her writing, Kennedy clarifies 
her point, claiming: “I’m always drawn to the border between what you want and 
what you want to say and what you need to say and what’s actually possible – the 
interior life and the exterior life. . . . So if I’ve got any kind of agenda at all it’s 
this: the people who come to me tend to be people who can’t say what they want 
to say, so I say that they can’t say what they want to say” (Kennedy qtd. in March, 
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53 The Banality of Violence in A. L. Kennedy’s Early Short Stories
“Kennedy” 117). In other words, Kennedy does not presume to appoint her char-
acters, whether female or male, to represent any larger social, economic, or other 
group and speak on its behalf; she cannot give voice to the voiceless, as the critical 
cliché goes, because she knows as little as her conflicted characters what it is that 
they are trying to express.
“There are no monsters”: The Motif of Violence in Kennedy’s Stories
If I could be the first pensioner film director, I would make films about us. I 
wouldn’t choose anyone special, like a spy, or a general, who might be remem-
bered, or famous for anything else. I would film an ordinary person, their story, 
because they have good stories, too.
—A. L. Kennedy, “Star Dust” (Kennedy, Geometry 88)
Kaye Mitchell aptly characterises Kennedy’s early work, noticing the author’s 
self-admitted preoccupation with the clash of the interior and the exterior, the 
private and the public, the particular and the general, pointing out that in Ken-
nedy’s imagination “these are not lives or people defined by their membership of 
groups but rather defined by their very lack of such membership. . . . Her focus 
is on specificity, particularity and the ways in which such lives are subsumed by 
some greater whole or system. Kennedy demonstrates an awareness of the po-
tential violence of this subsuming” (Mitchell 58). The short story proves to be a 
medium particularly well suited to resonating with the procession of small people 
whose small lives Kennedy depicts with sharp observational skills, a keen sense 
for detail – a peculiar gesture, an idiosyncratic word or a silence pregnant with 
meanings – and, above all, with unflinching honesty and quiet sympathy untaint-
ed by any demonstrative display of sentiment or excessive melodrama. Kennedy 
brings to the fore the raw experience of those who rarely attract serious attention 
in literary fiction, unless as curiosities, aberrations or even perversions: she devotes 
her stories to the overlooked uncomfortable struggles of disintegrated marriages, 
single mothers, alcoholic fathers, neglected children, the mentally ill, the elderly, 
sick and dying. In doing so with earnestness, grace and sensitivity, she respects 
and accepts any person without doubting their status as a human being, however 
inhuman they may appear. 
“It’s about humanity,” Kennedy insists when speaking about her preferred choice 
of seemingly monstrous characters. “Looking out of someone else’s eyes, and plan-
ning them as human, whoever they are. So you understand that there are no mon-
sters” (Kennedy qtd. in March, “Kennedy” 108). Kennedy painstakingly refrains 
from as much as implying any moral judgement and treads carefully to avoid de-
humanising her characters, so that in her chillingly understated stories, as Cristie 
March observes, “we see everyday people committing monstrous acts, illustrating 
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54 Ema JElínková both their humanity and their fallibility” (March, Rewriting 139). The bulk of Ken-
nedy’s work, but especially her early short story collections, manifests her preoccu-
pation with various forms of violence, though the domestic kind appears most fre-
quently, including both psychological and physical abuse, specifically the recurrent 
motifs of rape and molestation. Considering the noisily masculine nature of the 
Scottish cultural tradition, it does not come as a surprise that artistic explorations 
of violence have formed a large part of the tradition—in fact, a characteristically 
dark strain of hardboiled crime fiction marketed as “tartan noir” has been Scotland’s 
chief literary export product since the 1980s. The founder of the genre, William 
McIlvanney, in his pioneering tartan noir novel, Laidlaw (1977), interestingly voic-
es the same premise as A. L. Kennedy when it comes to dismissing the perpetrators 
of monstrous acts as monsters: “Monstrosity’s made by false gentility. You don’t get 
one without the other. No fairies, no monsters. Just people” (McIlvanney 85).
Kennedy’s oeuvre suggests the possibility of drawing another parallel with her 
argument against explaining away monstrous deeds as the actions of creatures 
that are less than human: her unorthodox line of thinking brings to mind the 
controversial concept of “the banality of evil” introduced and developed by Han-
nah Arendt in her observations on the trial of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, 
published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil 
(1963). Arendt (in the same way as, later, Kennedy in her fiction) does not in 
any thinkable way trivialise or even dare to excuse the atrocities committed by 
Eichmann and others; rather, she seeks to refute the simplistic popular notion of 
Eichmann and his like as monsters, as anomalies existing outside the ordinary 
course of humankind. Quite the contrary, Arendt stresses “that it would have 
been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster” (Arendt 
372); however, “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like 
him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and 
still are, terribly and terrifying normal” (Arendt 373). While “normal” may not 
be the best choice of word – alternatively, it might be more accurate to describe 
them as appearing normal rather than being normal – the point is that nothing 
sets the Little Eichmanns among us apart from the general population and that, 
by extension, we may each discover all the prerequisites for perpetrating evil in 
our very own selves. 
The discomforting idea of the banality of evil in general and violence in par -
ticular – “banality” in the above-defined sense as commonness, ordinariness, un-
exceptionality, as opposed to monstrosity, perversity, exceptionality – accordingly 
permeates much of Kennedy’s writing, where she sets out “to highlight the pres-
ence of the perverse within the normal”, as Mitchell formulates it, “thus decon-
structing that apparent dichotomy” (80). In arguably one of her most powerful 
and chilling stories, “The Boy’s Fat Dog” (1994), Kennedy seems to echo some of 
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55 The Banality of Violence in A. L. Kennedy’s Early Short Stories
Arendt’s concerns in fictionalised terms in choosing the backdrop of a major war 
conflict to present the disjointed (dis)contents of the mind of a voluntarily enlist-
ed soldier. The story dispenses with particulars regarding the setting, belligerents 
or nature of the conflict, which reinforces the universal resonance of its mes-
sage. Here and again in many other stories, Kennedy presents perfectly ordinary 
characters with dull everyday lives, whose routines are disrupted by unexpected 
but more or less unexceptional circumstances, which typically trigger inexplicably 
extreme responses, so that, as March remarks, she ultimately “allows us to see the 
thought processes of rational people who commit unthinkable acts, recognising 
that ‘there are no monsters’” (March, Rewriting 154).
In “The Boy’s Fat Dog”, the narrator-protagonist is shown surveying a peas -
ant village on the eve of its obliteration, a village which he himself spotted, duly 
reported and hence consigned to destruction. As his thoughts flow and freely 
associate, it transpires that he is actively and deliberately complicit in war crimes, 
including genocide, but also that he is deeply dissociated from the surrounding 
reality as well as from himself. It is as though he suddenly found himself in the 
midst of an escalated situation by an inexplicable accident which he cannot fath-
om, although his rational reasoning faculties remain perfectly intact: 
We were being asked to go out and kill these people before they could kill any 
more of us. There can be none of them left, because they have crossed a kind of 
line and become animal, machine, something unhuman and only concerned with 
killing people like me who have homes and rows of winter greens, two little girls, 
a red-haired wife and jobs that don’t quite suit them. (Kennedy, Now 148)
These are not the words of a deranged sadist who gets a kick out of raping women 
and slashing children across the face, and Kennedy takes great care not to present 
her protagonist as dehumanised: he has flashbacks of the little boy whose face he 
cut, “which was not what I intended”, as he plainly observes (Kennedy, Now 149); he 
feels bad about the pigs on which he practised killing and most of all, he pities the fat 
old dog which he watches moving around the village, hoping that the dog makes it 
out of the condemned village alive. It is worth noting that the dehumanisation cuts 
both ways, as the above-quoted passage illustrates, since it is not only we who deny 
the perpetrators of terrible crimes their humanity, it is also the rapists and murderers 
who depersonalise and objectify their victims, perceiving them as “animal, machine, 
something unhuman”, as the protagonist of the story puts it (Kennedy, Now 148).
“The Boy’s Fat Dog” illustrates Kennedy’s typical take on the banality of vio -
lence, and yet it is atypical in its focus on a grand-scale narrative of violence, for 
Kennedy characteristically deals with deceptively unremarkable domestic stories. 
Evaluating Kennedy’s work, Ali Smith argues that “the impetus for her writing 
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56 Ema JElínková is the giving of voice and articulacy to ordinary people who have been silenced 
by their ordinariness, the calling for due recognition of the complexities of their 
lives” (Smith 180). To what extent Kennedy actually does the job of “giving the 
voice and articulacy” to the silenced is debatable, since her characters are nearly 
always inarticulate and as often as not quiet, whether by choice, necessity or co-
ercion. What Kennedy indisputably does is to give these troubled character types 
presence, illuminating the invisible and centralising the marginal. Her characters 
yearn for connection and communication but their solipsistic inclinations, among 
other factors, prevent them from forging balanced relationships and functioning 
in them, leading to what David Borthwick terms “the loss of any spiritually fruit-
ful or intellectually rewarding intersubjective communication” (Borthwick 267). 
In Kennedy’s fictional world, communication eventually becomes replaced by 
silence and violence, as is the case of the marital fight in the story “Sweet Memory 
Will Die” (1990), whose protagonist replicates her father’s habitual abusive be-
haviour when her marriage starts disintegrating after the birth of her son Sandy 
and she hits her husband, who retaliates:
It’s funny, all the time it happened I thought of Sandy. I didn’t want him to hear 
us. I didn’t want him to know. He would have heard me falling, he would have 
heard the body, the feet, the head, but he didn’t hear my voice. I never made 
a sound that might worry him. Paul was quiet, too. There was only the noise 
inside when he hit me and the sound it made outside, in the room. The sound 
he would listen to. (Kennedy, Geometry 59–60)
Domestic violence is a recurrent motif not only in A. L. Kennedy but in a whole 
stream of Scottish working-class fiction, established by the infamous No Mean 
City (1935), a crudely naturalistic novel produced by H. Kingsley Long and Alex-
ander McArthur, which, despite its dubious literary merit, is significant in that it 
created the stock character of the wee hard man, a razor-slashing, heavy-drinking 
and wife-beating Scottish slum dweller. The very existence of a perpetrator of do-
mestic abuse as a stock character type in Scottish literature evidences that violence 
is a major theme and a prevalent phenomenon, certainly in the fictional worlds of 
Scottish writers.
Apart from Kennedy’s preoccupation with domestic abuse, Mitchell notices 
“the proximity of sex and violence” underlying much of her writing (Mitchell 80), 
where the blurred boundaries between seemingly irreconcilable opposites evolve 
into a series of other unlikely combinations, including not only the commonplace 
confusion of sex and love but, even more alarmingly, the conflation of paren-
tal love and child abuse. In the deeply disturbing story “A Perfect Possession” 
(1994), a married couple who are orthodox believers set out on the godly mission 
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57 The Banality of Violence in A. L. Kennedy’s Early Short Stories
of exorcising their young son of supposed sin, substituting literal pain for love, 
convinced that “it hurts when we love somebody, because loving is a painful thing, 
that is its nature” (Kennedy, Now 1). Another uneasy story, “Friday Payday” (1994), 
featuring an underage Scottish prostitute who fled from her abusive father to 
London, illustrates the all-too-common rationalisation of fathers sexually abusing 
their daughters: “Father called it having a cuddle and said it was her mother’s fault. 
He’d used to do this with her mother but then she’d gone to somewhere else and 
he still needed someone because he was a normal man” (Kennedy, Now 133). This 
train of thought is reminiscent of a scene along the same lines in a much-beloved 
classic Scottish novel, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), which Kennedy 
seems to echo in her story, also in terms of paying a tribute to fierce women survi-
vors far surpassing their weak men as well as in terms of a passionate love for the 
land, though translated in Kennedy’s story into an updated language: “Sometimes 
she just got dead homesick – adverts on the underground for Scotland, they lied 
like fuck, but they still made you think” (Kennedy, Now 142). 
Kennedy emphasises the banality of violence in her stories by presenting vio-
lence typically as a character’s primitive, unskilled first response to circumstances 
beyond their control which they do not have the knowledge, experience or ability 
to handle in a constructive rather than destructive manner. Many of her characters 
feel vaguely anxious, insecure and threatened by the commonplace but no less 
acutely experienced uncertainties of everyday life, and their heightened neuroti-
cism makes them easily susceptible to even seemingly minor stress factors, which 
triggers the fight-or-flight reflex in them. When they choose to fight, they follow 
their biological survival instinct to the fullest and opt for physical violence instead 
of taking the extra step that is needed for impulse control and a rational consid-
eration of other than violent options. This process is well illustrated in the story 
“Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains” (1990), whose protagonist makes 
what looks like an inconsequential small adjustment in her daily routine, which, 
however, leads to her arriving home early and finding her husband Duncan with 
his mistress. She unthinkingly picks up a carving knife, only to realise that she has 
no idea what she intends to do with it:
I was going to run back to the bedroom and do what you would do with a 
carving knife, maybe to one of them, maybe to both, or perhaps just cut off his 
prick. . . In the end I tried to stab the knife into the worksurface, so that he 
would see it there, sticking up, and know that he’d had a near miss. The point 
slid across the formica and my hand went down on the blade, so that all of the 
fingers began to bleed. When Duncan came in, there was blood everywhere 
and my hand was under the tap and I’m sure he believed I’d tried to kill myself. 
(Kennedy, Geometry 33–34)
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58 Ema JElínková Apart from Kennedy’s trademark sense of understated dark humour, this scene 
shows an ordinary character’s failure to cope when her accustomed internal 
mundanity is disrupted by an external threat. Here Kennedy does not depict a 
brutal monster but a mere human being who resorts to violence – though gone 
grotesquely awry in this case – because of a lack of insight into other options. 
Here and elsewhere, violence acts as a substitute for communication, which is 
the missing piece in much of Kennedy’s writing, as Eluned Summers-Bremner 
observes: 
Kennedy’s characters frequently suffer from incommunicable feelings that 
have an intimate relation to language while not being expressible within it. The 
feelings themselves are often of impotence and lack, which increases relative 
to attempts to use words to convey them, or of a promissory fullness whose 
comforts cannot be reached. It is as though language, through which the body 
gains a useful, if ill-fitting, means of communication, fails to silence the body’s 
inarticulate response to this arrangement in the flesh. (Summers-Bremner 124)
Kennedy’s characters “communicate” through violence, which is, in their case, as 
banal a means of expression as language is to those more articulate; the intention 
in both cases being not primarily to cause harm but to establish a connection with 
another person, with the world at large but also with oneself. Kennedy’s work 
reaches a universal human resonance with its concentration on the small lives of 
ordinary people, and yet it also stands out as a unique take on and, simultaneously, 
an embodiment of the peculiarities of Scottish experience, the slight differences 
and little details that make each of us individual while at the same time always be-
longing to one human race. Even if Kennedy can be disconcerting, even disturb-
ing, as Sarah Dunnigan points out, she equally “creates an almost fabled beauty 
at the heart of her most tender fictions about lovers, and daughters and fathers. 
While her work as a whole is about the emotionally and politically disenfran-
chised and dispossessed, it also aims to discover the means of (re)enchantment” 
(Dunnigan 154).
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edited by Peter Baehr, Penguin, 2000, pp. 313–88.
Borthwick, David. “A. L. Kennedy’s Dysphoric Fictions”. The Edinburgh Compan -
ion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, edited by Berthold Schoene, Edinburgh 
UP , 2007, pp. 264–71.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex . 1949. Vintage, 1997.
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Dunnigan, Sarah M. “A. L. Kennedy’s Longer Fiction: Articulate Grace”. Con-
temporary Scottish Women Writers, edited by Aileen Christianson and Alison 
Lumsden, Edinburgh UP , 2000, pp. 144–55.
Galloway, Janice. “Different Oracles: Me and Alasdair Gray”. Review of Contem-
porary Fiction, vol. 15, no. 2, 1995, pp. 193–96.
Gray, Alasdair. Lanark: A Life in Four Books. 1981. Canongate, 2007.
Kennedy, A. L. Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains. 1990. Phoenix, 1993.
Kennedy, A. L. Now that You’re Back. 1994. Vintage, 2005.
March, Cristie. “Interview with A. L. Kennedy”. Edinburgh Review, no. 101, 1999, 
pp. 99–119.
March, Cristie. “Interview with Janice Galloway”. Edinburgh Review, no. 101, 
1999, pp. 85–98.
March, Cristie L. Rewriting Scotland: W elsh, McLean, W arner, Banks, Galloway and 
Kennedy. Manchester UP , 2002.
McIlvanney, William. Laidlaw. 1977. Canongate, 2013.
Merritt, Stephanie. “What’s It Like Being a Scottish Writer? I Don’t Know. I’ve 
Never Been Anything Else”. The Observer , 23 May 1999, p. 13.
Mitchell, Kaye. A. L. Kennedy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Smith, Ali. “Four Success Stories”. Chapman, vol. 74, no. 5, 1993, pp. 177–192.
Summers-Bremner, Eluned. “‘Fiction with a Thread of Scottishness in its Truth’: 
The Paradox of the National in A. L. Kennedy”. Contemporary British Women 
Writers, edited by Emma Parker, Boydell and Brewer, 2004, pp. 123–38.
Ema Jelínková
Palacky University Olomouc
Ema.jelinkova@upol.cz
Banalnost nasilja v zgodnjih zgodbah A  L  Kennedyja
Članek uporabi concept Hannah Arendt o banalnosti nasilja za ilustracijo banalnost spe-
cifične manifestacije zla, ki je nasilje, kot ga najdemo v zgodnjih kratkih zgodbah A.L. 
Kennedyja.
Ključne besede: škotska književnost, žensko pisanje, banalnost zla, nasilje
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