Sporting with the Gods
The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Literature

Sporting with the Gods examines the metaphors of 'play', 'game' and 'sport' as they are reflected in American literature and culture.

Michael Oriard (Author)

9780521391139, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 February 1991

600 pages
24 x 16 x 3.8 cm, 0.954 kg

"...we now have the play-game critical text that will become standard in American culture study. Oriard dazzles the reader with play's suppleness and scope." Christian K. Messenger, American Historical Review

Sporting with the Gods examines the metaphors of 'play', 'game' and 'sport' as they are reflected in American literature and culture. The 'race' for salvation and success, the great 'games' of business and politics, the distinctive American version of 'fair play', the desperate 'game' against an all-powerful opponent and the cruelties of chance and fate by which man becomes the 'sport of the gods' - all of these metaphors touch fundamental American beliefs about fate and freedom, competition and chance, finitude and possibility. The book traces the cultural history of these metaphors primarily through American literary texts (from Cooper and Hawthorne to Updike and Mailer) but also through a wide range of nonliterary writings (sermons, dime novels, success writing, countercultural manifestoes, political rhetoric, etc.). The result is a cultural history of America from its inception.

Preface
Prologue: 'The game and the nation'
Part I. Sportsmen and Gamesmen in the Nineteenth Century: 1. Play, sport and western mythmaking
2. Play, sport and southern honour
3. Gender and the game
Part II. Raising the Stakes: 4. Playing the game of life
5. 'The game' in business fiction
6. Desperate players and the sport of the gods
Part III. Twentieth-Century Legacies: 7. Sportsmen and gamesmen in twentieth-century fiction
8. In the wake of Moby-Dick
9. The 'great games' of politics and business
Part IV. Holy Play and the Counterculture: 10. Transcendental play and the theology of sentimentalism
11. Play and the counterculture in the 1920s
12. From beats and hippies to the new age
Epilogue
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]