Writing the Body in Motion
A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature
Distributed for Athabasca University Press
Writing the Body in Motion
A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature
Sport literature is never just about sport. The genre’s potential to explore the human condition, including aspects of violence, gender, and the body, has sparked the interest of writers, readers, and scholars. Over the last decade, a proliferation of sport literature courses across the continent is evidence of the sophisticated and evolving body of work developing in this area. Writing the Body in Motion offers introductory essays on the most commonly taught Canadian sport literature texts. The contributions sketch the state of current scholarship, highlight recurring themes and patterns, and offer close readings of key works. Organized chronologically by source text, ranging from Shoeless Joe (1982) to Indian Horse (2012), the essays offer a variety of ways to read, consider, teach, and write about sport literature.
Table of Contents
Introduction / Angie Abdou
1 W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe: Real People and Fantasy Quests / Fred Mason
2 “I join them in the circle”: Mythologizing Hockey and Identity in Paul Quarrington’s King Leary / Cara Hedley
3 Hockey, Humour, and Play Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans / Jason Blake
4 “steel on water frozen calm”: the Poetry of Hockey in Richard Harrison’s Hero of the Play / Paul Martin
5 Glaciers, Embodiment, and the Sublime: An Introduction to Ecocriticism and Thomas Wharton’s Icefields / Cory Willard
6 Hockey, Zen and the Art of The Good Body / Jamie Dopp
7 The Sporting Woman in Literature: Strategies of Exclusion and the Absence-Presence of the Male Athlete in Cara Hedley’s Twenty Miles / Susan J. Bandy
8 The Darkening Path: the Hero-Athlete Reconsidered in The Bone Cage / Gyllian Phillips
9 “Open the door to the roaring darkness”:the enigma of Terry Sawchuk in Randall Maggs’ Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems / Paul Martin
10 From Tank to Deep Water: Samantha Warwick’s Sage Island / Jamie Dopp
11 Identity and the Athlete: Alexander MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile” / Laura K Davis
12 Decolonizing the Hockey Novel: Ambivalence & Apotheosis in Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse /Sam McKegney and Trevor Phillips