In this comprehensive and insightful study, Christian K. Messenger contends that American writers have always created characters at play in the sure knowledge that to be active in sport in America is to be in touch with its people, their traditions, and their fantasy lives. This is the first inclusive critical study of sport in American fiction with chapters on individual authors such as Hawthorne, Lardner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, as well as studies of sport in the literature of the frontier and in boys' formula fiction. A work of literary criticism, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction also draws on the cultural history of American sport and leisure and on a century of American literature.

Over the course of the last century, American fiction writers and poets have used sports figures and sporting events in order to make significant points on themes of identity as they are connected to gender, race, class, and nationality. The contributors to this volume examine American literature that uses sports as a trope to explore or disturb core values of this country. They explore individual works in order to uncover the rich connections between those works' use of sports and issues of importance to American culture from approximately 1920 to the end of the twentieth century. Focusing on four general themes, this volume offers a range of commentary on a variety of American literature. The first section features essays that explain how sports are used by writers to explore or critique American values. The next two sections contain essays that investigate the ways in which writers have used sports to express ideas about race, class, and gender. The final section turns to questions of aesthetics, featuring essays that concentrate on form, technique, and language itself. Together, contributors cover a number of literary works that feature a wide variety of sports, from the expected (baseball) to the more surprising (body building and wilderness adventuring).

Contemporary American Fiction provides an introduction to American fiction since 1970. Offering substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty texts by thirty different writers, Millard combines them in an innovative critical structure designed to promote debates on cultural politics and aesthetic value. The book is the first of its kind to offer a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in the fiction of the United States. Recent novels by established writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth are analysed alongside the fiction of younger writers such as Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie. The books innovative structure encourages new ways of thinking about how American writers might be configured in relation to each other, while providing an analysis of how contemporary fiction has responded to changes in central areas of American life such as the family, the media, technology, and consumerism. Contemporary American Fiction is a substantial critical introduction to some of the most exciting fiction of the last thirty years, an eclectic and thorough advertisement for the extraordinary vitality of American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. This is an excellent introduction to the subject for undergraduate students of modern American literature.

In the essays collected here, amateurism, both as ideology and practice, is subject to critical and unsentimental scrutiny, effectively challenging the dominant narrative of more conventional histories of British sport.

Today's calender is set in the minds of many people by the World Series, Wimbledon, the Super Bowl, and the World Cup, rather than by months and days. Sport must mean something. What? Richard Mandell's Sport: A Cultural History shows that sport has always vividly illustrated and reinforced the existing social and moral order. Considering that much of modern sport has evolved in England and America, it is remarkable that so few comprehensive serious studies of sport have appeared in English. This fascinatingly written, generously illustrated volume fills a gap in the literature of world cultural history. The author deals here not only with sport in the classical world where the Olympics were born, but also with sport in early industrial England, China, Japan, and modern America.

Hockey occupies a prominent place in the Canadian cultural lexicon, as evidenced by the wealth of hockey-centred stories and novels published within Canada. In this exciting new work, Jason Blake takes readers on a thematic journey through Canadian hockey literature, examining five common themes - nationhood, the hockey dream, violence, national identity, and family - as they appear in hockey fiction. Blake examines the work of such authors as Mordecai Richler, David Adams Richards, Paul Quarrington, and Richard B. Wright, arguing that a study of contemporary hockey fiction exposes a troubled relationship with the national sport. Rather than the storybook happy ending common in sports literature of previous generations, Blake finds that today's fiction portrays hockey as an often-glorified sport that in fact leads to broken lives and ironic outlooks. The first book to focus exclusively on hockey in print, Canadian Hockey Literature is an accessible work that challenges popular perceptions of a much-beloved national pastime.

This distinctive Handbook covers the breadth of sports and media scholarship, one of the up-and-coming topics bridging media entertainment, sports management, and popular culture. Organized into historical, institutional, spectator, and critical studies perspectives, this volume brings together the work of many researchers into one quintessential volume, defining the full scope of the subject area. Editors Arthur Raney and Jennings Bryant have recruited contributors from around the world to identify and synthesize the research representing numerous facets of the sports-media relationship. As a unique collection on a very timely topic, the volume offers chapters examining the development of sports media; production, coverage, and economics of sports media; sports media audiences; sports promotion; and race and gender issues in sports and media. Unique in its orientation and breadth, the Handbook of Sports and Media is destined to play a major role in the future development of this fast-growing area of study. It is a must-have work for scholars, researchers, and graduate students working in media entertainment, media psychology, mass media/mass communication, sports marketing and management, popular communication, popular culture, and cultural studies.