Sport and the Literary Imagination

The Author: Jeffrey Hill is currently Director of the International Centre for Sport History and Culture and Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. He previously worked at Nottingham Trent University, and still lives in Nottingham. He has been a Visiting Professor at Columbus State University, Georgia, USA, and joint editor of the journal Sport in History. His academic interests link the social and cultural history of leisure with questions of historiography.

• Contents: The Historicity of the Text: A Historian’s Reading – ‘Mean Drab Times’: Robin Jenkins’s The Thistle and the Grail – ‘Acting Big’: David Storey’s This Sporting Life – ‘You are up against mean, small-minded men’: Brian Glanville’s The Rise of Gerry Logan – Men, ‘A Boy’s Game’, and America: Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral – ‘The Relentless Pain and Responsibility of Club Football’: Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch – ‘I’ll Kill ’Em All’: Ring Lardner’s Midge Kelly – ‘A Perfected Model of an Imperfect World’: Thomas Keneally’s A Family Madness – ‘You Don’t Upset the Shaygets’: Howard Jacobson’s The Mighty Walzer.

«His book has much to offer. Drawing on and extending Michael Oriard's work on representations of American sport as constructive forces, Hill brings important attention to understudied fictions of British sport in particular; moreover, his literary selections direct us to broaden and deepen our sense for what sports fiction and sports history mean.» (Thomas A. Hamill, Journal of British Studies)