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Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction
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.
eBook
Lost in the lights : sports, dreams, and life
A veteran journalist's collection of sportswriting on the blue-collar South.
Sport mirrors life. Or, in Paul Hemphill's opinion, 'Sport is life.' The 15 pieces in this compelling collection are arranged along the timeline for an aspiring athlete's dream: 'The Dawning,' with stories about boys hoping and trying to become men, 'The Striving,' about athletes at work, defining themselves through their play, and 'The Gloaming,' about the twilight time when athletes contend with broken dreams and fading powers. Through all the pieces, Hemphill exhibits his passion for the sports he covers and a keen eye for the dramas, details, and hopes that fire the lives of athletes, allowing them to become prototypes of all human existence.
Most of the stories have been previously published in such national magazines as Sports Illustrated, True, Life, Today's Health, and Sport. In 'White Bread and Baseball,' the author chronicles his own boyhood infatuation with the minor-league Birmingham Barons, while in 'Yesterday's Hero' he details the sad end of a former All-American football player named Bob Suffridge, a portrait of a lion in winter. 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Whirl' covers nights on the road with the roller derby, and 'Saturday Night at Dixie Speedway' captures all the raucous glory of a stock-car dirt track under the hot lights. 'Big Night, Big City' tells of an anxious, small-town high school basketball team facing their crucial chance for glory at a state tournament in Atlanta, and the classic 'Mister Cobb' details a personal lesson on sliding the young author received from 'the greatest player in the history of baseball.'
These stories are often bittersweet, emotional, and mythic: little dramas bearing impact and psychological 'size.' Some of them are distinctively 'Dixie,' but they ultimately transcend time and place. Frye Gaillard, author of Kyle at 200 MPH: A Sizzling Season in the Petty-NASCAR Dynasty, writes, 'For more than 30 years, Paul Hemphill has been one of the finest writers in the South, and I think he proves it again in this collection. He exudes a natural feel for the players and the game, drawing out the real-life themes of struggle and desire, occasional triumph, and the omnipresent possibilities of heartache and failure.'
Paul Hemphill is a journalist and sportswriter and author of fourteen books, including Leaving Birmingham: Notes of a Native Son and The Ballad of Little River: A Tale of Race and Unrest in the Rural South, both published by The University of Alabama Press.
eBook
Frank Merriwell and the fiction of All-American boyhood : the Progressive Era creation of the schoolboy sport story
Gilbert Patten, writing as Burt L. Standish, made a career of generating serialized twenty-thousand-word stories featuring his fictional creation Frank Merriwell, a student athlete at Yale University who inspired others to emulate his example of manly boyhood. Patten and his publisher, Street and Smith, initially had only a general idea about what would constitute Merriwell's adventures and who would want to read about them when they introduced the hero in the dime novel Tip Top Weekly in 1896, but over the years what took shape was a story line that capitalized on middle-class fears about the insidious influence of modern life on the nation's boys. Merriwell came to symbolize the Progressive Era debate about how sport and school made boys into men. The saga featured the attractive Merriwell distinguishing between \"good\" and \"bad\" girls and focused on his squeaky-clean adventures in physical development and mentorship. By the serial's conclusion, Merriwell had opened a school for \"weak and wayward boys\" that made him into a figure who taught readers how to approximate his example. In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Anderson treats Tip Top Weekly as a historical artifact, supplementing his reading of its text, illustrations, reader letters, and advertisements with his use of editorial correspondence, memoirs, trade journals, and legal documents. Anderson blends social and cultural history, with the history of business, gender, and sport, along with a general examination of childhood and youth in this fascinating study of how a fictional character was used to promote a homogeneous \"normal\" American boyhood rooted in an assumed pecking order of class, race, and gender.
Book
Transcending invisible lanes through inclusion of athletics memories in archival systems in South Africa
In countries like South Africa, sports have the power to transcend invisible lanes of politics and race and thus inspire citizens to come together. Sport, including athletics, has been demonstrated as an instrument of solidarity of fragmented cultures. However, while sport is of such significance, it is still minimally represented in public archival holdings in South Africa. Despite the mandate to transform the archival system, evidence suggests that much of the memories of sports heroes, especially that of athletes, have not been recorded. This qualitative study utilised oral history as a research method to explore the feasibility of building inclusive archives through the collection of sports memories. Athlete participants were identified through snowball sampling and data were collected using both oral testimony interviews from athletes with first-hand information and oral tradition augmented through document analysis. The results of the study indicated that there are stories and memories of many great South African distance runners that must be told and included in the archive repositories. Sadly, these stories have not been recorded in written words, as there is a tendency to perpetuate elitism by documenting mostly oral history of prominent members of society with political power. The study revealed that most of athletes' memories from their running careers include certificates, trophies, medals, Springbok jerseys, newspaper clippings and pictures in their possession. It is concluded that until these sports archives and objects are considered as an important and unique element of South African history, they will forever be lost. Contribution This study makes a contribution to the ongoing discourse of building inclusive archives in South Africa through the collection of athletics memories. The study is linked to the scope of the journal through propagating the inclusion of marginalised voices of athletics sports memories in mainstream archives.
Journal Article
Striker assist
Talented striker Jax Cooper has been Most Valuable Player for the Screaming Hawks for four years in a row, but when he joins a traveling league he finds out that he still has a lot to learn about teamwork.
Book
Lost in the lights
A veteran journalist' s collection of sportswriting on the blue-collar South.Sport mirrors life. Or, in Paul Hemphill's opinion, \" Sport is life.\" The 15 pieces in this compelling collection are arranged along the timeline for an aspiring athlete's dream: \" The Dawning,\" with stories about boys hoping and trying to become men, \" The Striving,\" about athletes at work, defining themselves through their play, and \" The Gloaming,\" about the twilight time when athletes contend with broken dreams and fading powers. Through all the pieces, Hemphill exhibits his passion for the sports he covers and a keen eye for the dramas, details, and hopes that fire the lives of athletes, allowing them to become prototypes of all human existence.Most of the stories have been previously published in such national magazines as Sports Illustrated, True, Life, Today' s Health, and Sport. In \" White Bread and Baseball,\" the author chronicles his own boyhood infatuation with the minor-league Birmingham Barons, while in \" Yesterday' s Hero\" he details the sad end of a former All-American football player named Bob Suffridge, a portrait of a lion in winter. \" It' s a Mad, Mad, Mad Whirl\" covers nights on the road with the roller derby, and \" Saturday Night at Dixie Speedway\" captures all the raucous glory of a stock-car dirt track under the hot lights. \" Big Night, Big City\" tells of an anxious, small-town high school basketball team facing their crucial chance for glory at a state tournament in Atlanta, and the classic \" Mister Cobb\" details a personal lesson on sliding the young author received from \" the greatest player in the history of baseball.\"These stories are often bittersweet, emotional, and mythic: little dramas bearing impact and psychological \" size.\" Some of them are distinctively \" Dixie,\" but they ultimately transcend time and place. Frye Gaillard, author of Kyle at 200 MPH: A Sizzling Season in the Petty-NASCAR Dynasty, writes, \" For more than 30 years, Paul Hemphill has been one of the finest writers in the South, and I think he proves it again in this collection. He exudes a natural feel for the players and the game, drawing out the real-life themes of struggle and desire, occasional triumph, and the omnipresent possibilities of heartache and failure.\"
eBook
Say it ain't so
\"Lenny gets jealous when Mike makes the school baseball team, but together they and Other Mike stumble upon a stealing signals scandal that could go further up than anyone knows\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
