Cultures of Boxing

Bringing together boxing writers from different cultural and disciplinary perspectives, this book offers a vital and original contribution to the understanding of this enduringly fascinating and controversial sport.
This collected volume investigates what is at stake in boxing in the modern world by exploring different aspects of boxing culture and problematic concepts attached to the sport such as masculinity and violence. This approach implies input from different academic and creative disciplines including aesthetics, cultural studies, creative writing, anthropology, history, literature and sociology. The points of view of participants in boxing as a sport, amateur and professional, will also be incorporated. In this way, themes as different as what it feels like to receive a punch on the nose or the role of fist-fighting in traditional Russian folk customs will be explored.

Autorentext

David Scott holds a personal chair in French (Textual and Visual Studies) at Trinity College Dublin. A middleweight amateur boxer, he has explored his experience of boxing in terms both of creative writing (The Aura of Boxing, 2014) and academic study (The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, 2009). His interest in the representation of boxing in writing, the visual arts and in design reflects his wider academic and creative interests which include literature, painting, semiotics and textual/visual studies, around which subjects he has organised a number of exhibitions and on which he has published many books. He is currently working on a collection of short stories entitled Boxing Rings.

Inhalt

Contents: Joseph D. Lewandowski: Boxing and Urban Culture - Wolf-Dietrich Junghanns: The Historical Transformations of the «Boxing Idol»: The Case of Max Schmeling - Marcy S. Sacks: Speaking Through Silence? Whites' Efforts to Make Meaning of Joe Louis - Philip Dine: Boxing and «Ethnic» Masculinity in Colonial North Africa - Darryl Jones: Iron Mike and Me: The Fall and Further Fall of Mike Tyson - Wolf-Dietrich Junghanns: Single and Mass Combats: A Comparison of Traditional Russian Fist-Fighting and Western Boxing - Sharon Harrow: Ideology and Satire in English Bare-Knuckle Boxing Literature - David Scott: Boxers' Noses - Robert Anasi: A Nose for Punchers: A. J. Liebling's Boxing Writing - Kasia Boddy: «He certainly was a fighter»: Boxing as Bildungsroman in Ellison and Bellow - Karin Rase: Boxing as Staged Performance in Contemporary Art.