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.
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Play, Game, Sport
- PART I Play, Game, Sport: Classic American Literature
- 1. Hawthorne: The Play Spirit
- Creating the FIctional Arena
- Play and the Dance of Death
- The Scarlet Letter: The English Green
- The Scarlet Letter: Hester and Pearl in Play and Freedom
- 2. Sport and Society
- Irving: Happy Valley
- Cooper: Correct Conduct in Nature
- Thoreau: The Hunter and Higher Laws
- PART II The Popular Sports Hero
- 3. Sport and the Frontier
- Agon and Alea: Competition and Chance
- Southern and Backwoods Sport
- The Almanac Hero: Crockett and FInk
- WIliam Porter and the Spirit of the Times
- Southwestern Humor and Frontier Sport
- 4. Organized Sport and Its Reporters
- Transformation of Sport in Industrial America
- Journalism and Popular Sport
- Sport in the Dime Novel
- 5. Lardner: The Popular Sports Hero
- Lardner and Baseball
- Lardner and Southwestern Humor Tradition
- Lardner and 1920s Popular Culture
- PART III The School Sports Hero
- 6. The Incarnation of the College Athletic Hero
- The College Athletic Hero in Fiction: Crane, Norris, Davis
- 7. The Boys' School Sports Story
- Thomas Hughes and Tom Brown
- GIlbert Patten and Frank Merriwell
- Ralph Henry Barbour, Owen Johnson, Jesse Lynch Williams
- 8. Fitzgerald: The School Sports Hero
- Princeton and Amory Blaine
- Yale and Tom Buchanan
- Gatsby, Daisy and Ted Fay: The Football Metaphor
- The Play Spirit: Gatsby and Dick Diver
- Frank Chance's Diamond Versus Hobey Baker's Gridiron
- 9. The School Sports Hero as Satiric Emblem: Hemingway and Faulkner
- Robert Cohn: Princeton to Pamplona
- Frank Merriwell in Frenchman's Bend
- The School Sports Hero in Eclipse
- PART IV The Modern Ritual Sports Hero
- 10. Hemingway: Exemplary Heroism and Heroic Witnessing
- Playing the Real and the Scared
- Hemingway: The Solitary Sportsman
- The Sun Also Rises: Varieties of Sports Experience
- Exemplary Heroism: Pedro Romero and Juan Belmonte
- Heroic Witnessing: Jake Barnes
- Boxing and Hard Times: Hemingway's Stoic Veterans
- 11. Faulkner: The Play Spirit
- Sartoris, The Unvanquished: Play and War
- The Hamlet: Performing Their Nature
- The Hamlet: Games and Ritual
- The Hamlet: Play and Freedom
- 12. Sport Approaches the Sacred: Hemingway and Faulkner
- Santiago: The Gulf Sream and Heroic Resignation
- Ike McCaslin: Engagement and Renunciation
- Santiago and Ike McCaslin: The Last Hunters
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
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