This sporting life

• Verfasst von: Colls, Robert [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: This sporting life
• Titelzusatz: sport and liberty in England, 1760-1960
• Verf.angabe: Robert Colls
• Ausgabe: First edition.
• Verlagsort: Oxford
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Jahr: 2020
• Umfang: 1 online resource
• Illustrationen: illustrations (black and white, and colour).
• Gesamttitel/Reihe: Oxford scholarship online
• Fussnoten: This edition also issued in print: 2020. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on August 24, 2020)
• ISBN: 978-0-19-187454-3
• DOI: doi:10.1093/oso/9780198208334.001.0001
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• Bibliogr. Hinweis: Erscheint auch als : Druck-Ausgabe
• K10plus-PPN: 1733846948
• K10plus-PPN:
  Universitätsbibliothek
• Lokale URL UB: Zum Volltext

Abstract

'This Sporting Life' offers an important view of England's cultural history through its sporting pursuits, carrying the reader to a match or a hunt or a fight, viscerally drawing a portrait of the sounds and smells, and showing that sport has been as important in defining British culture as gender, politics, education, class, and religion.

Abstract

"This is a history of sport as one of England's great civil cultures. It addresses 'sports' as athletic competitions, 'sport' as fun and games and showing off, and sporting occasions as a mixture of both. The subject does not lend itself to simple definitions, and the book does not try to impose any. By and large, it takes sport as it found it in the lives of the people. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from oil paintings to handbills, from the criminal to the constitutional, all the chapters begin with a 'thick' description of a sporting event before spreading the net to bring in the longer history, and meaning, of the sport in question. No one ever doubted that there was more to sport than sport itself. Prize-fighting and riding found particular favour with the army, cricket and rowing with the public schools, hockey and lacrosse with the education of middle-class girls, scarves and colours with the part sport played in the invention of the modern university. Above all, sport in England was recognized as liberty, the physical freedom to be. Of course, sport was not liberty's only expression. There was always politics. Puritans fought a civil war for liberty and saw sport as a snare and a sin. For the first 100 years of this book, Methodists (and not only them) saw sportsmen as creatures of greed and corruption. This Sporting Life tries to show the reader some part of what it was like to be alive, and feel alive, rich and poor, men and women, young and old, in England, between 1760 and 1960"--