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

by Michael Oriard

• ISBN13: 9780521391139
• ISBN10: 052139113X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1991-02-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface

Prologue: 'The game and the nation'

Sportsmen and Gamesmen in the Nineteenth Century

Play, sport and western mythmaking

Play, sport and southern honour

Gender and the game

Raising the Stakes

Playing the game of life

'The game' in business fiction

Desperate players and the sport of the gods

Twentieth-Century Legacies

Sportsmen and gamesmen in twentieth-century fiction

In the wake of Moby-Dick

The 'great games' of politics and business

Holy Play and the Counterculture

Transcendental play and the theology of sentimentalism

Play and the counterculture in the 1920s

From beats and hippies to the new age

Epilogue

Notes

Index.

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