Baseball and Social Class

by Kates, Ronald E.; Tormey, Warren

• ISBN13: 9780786472390
• ISBN10: 0786472391
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-11-03
• Publisher: McFarland Publishing

Summary

This collection of fresh essays seeks to examine the intersection of baseball and social class, pointing to the conclusion that America's game, infused from its origins with a democratic mythos and founded on high-minded principles of meritocracy, is nonetheless fraught with problematic class contradictions. Each essayist has explored how class standing has influenced some aspect of the game as experienced by those who play it, those who watch it, those who write about it, and those who market it. the topic of class is an amorphous one and in tying it to baseball the contributors have considered matters of race, education, locality, integration, assimilation, and cultural standing. These elements are crucial to understanding how baseball creates, preserves, reinforces and occasionally assails class divisions among those who watch, play, and own the game.

Author Biography

Ronald E. Kates is an associate professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Warren Tormey is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. They co-chair (along with Crosby Hunt) the Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Preface	p. 1
Gothic Baseball: The Death of Mary Rogers and the "Birth" of Baseball History	p. 7
Freedom and Baseball: The Uplift of Sport	p. 28
Born a Busher; or, How Journalists-Turned-Fiction Writers Made Baseball Safe for the Middle-Class Readers of the Saturday Evening Post	p. 44
"Disgraceful employment": The Gentleman Amateur in Eric Rolfe Greenberg's The Celebrant	p. 60
Rings Born of Impulse: Gift-Exchange Economies in Greenberg's The Celebrant	p. 74
Playing the Field: Rube Marquard's Performance of Class Identity in Early Twentieth Century Baseball and Vaudeville	p. 85
"The Old College Try": Eddie Collins and the 1919 Black Sox	p. 98
The "Lost Art" of Baseball: James Weldon Johnson, the Negro Leagues and the "Black Bohemia" of the Harlem Renaissance	p. 112
The Gentle Player: Baseball and the "Gentle People" in Irwin Shaw's Short Fiction	p. 126
Setting a Place for Mickey Mantle: Baseball, Class and Local Identity in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus	p. 139
Phillip Roth's Comic Corrective	p. 148
Class (Un)Consciousness: The Unusual Case of Jackie Robinson	p. 162
Commonwealth: Hardt, Negri and the Contemporary Class Struggle for the National Pastime	p. 173
About the Contributors	p. 191
Index	p. 195
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