Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850

Description

In the eighteenth century sport as we know it emerged as a definable social activity. Hunting and other country sports became the source of significant innovations in visual art; racing and boxing generated important subcultures; and sport's impact on good health permeated medical, historical, and philosophical writings. Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850 is a collection of essays that charts important developments in the study of sport in the eighteenth century. Editors Daniel O'Quinn and Alexis Tadi? have gathered together an array of European and North American scholars to critically examine the educational, political, and medical contexts that separated sports from other physical activities. The volume reveals how the mediation of sporting activities, through match reports, pictures, and players, transcended the field of aristocratic patronage and gave rise to the social and economic forces we now associate with sports. In Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850, O'Quinn and Tadi? successfully lay the groundwork for future research on the complex intersection of power, pleasure, and representation in sports culture. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: Classical Lineages 1 What Is Sport? Arts of Rural Sport and the Art of Poetry, 1650–1800 2 Funeral Games: Ludic Events, Imperial Violence, Authorial Encounters 3 Fencing and the Market in Aristocratic Masculinity Part Two: Sporting Animals and Their Uses 4 Turf Wars: Violence, Politics, and the Newmarket Riot of 1751 5 Animals as Heroes of the Hunt 6 Horse Racing in Early Colonial Algeria: From Anglophilia to Arabomania Part Three: The Mediation of Sports 7 Sport and the Body Politic: Athletic Competitions in Rousseau’s Republican Theory 8 Writing Fighting/Fighting Writing: Jon Badcock and the Conflicted Nature of Sports Journalism in the Regency 9 At Play in the Mountains: The Development of British Mountaineering in the Romantic Period Part Four: The Sporting Body 10 Sports, Recreation, and Medicine in Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Italy and France 11 Healing Hysteric Bodies: Women and Physical Exercise in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 12 “The Physical Powers of Man”: The Emergence of Physical Training in the Eighteenth Century 13 What Is Training? Coda – Pilgrim, Pundit, Photographer, Spy: The Ambiguous Origins of Himalayan Mountaineering Bibliography Contributors Index