Literary Sports Journalism

This book delivers a powerful argument for the centrality of sport in culture, exploring how fine sports writing bestows meaning upon the human world. Literary Sports Journalism: Beyond the Boundaries explores the multiple and fertile interconnections between sports writing and mainstream creative writing, including the works of Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Joyce Carol Oates and Martin Amis. In so doing, it delivers a reappraisal of a number of key writers. As such, the book aims to unite journalism studies with both literary analysis and philosophy. At root it is an inquiry into aesthetics: an exploration of the beauty of words, the beauty (and ugliness) of sport, and the distinctive beauty that arises when words are used to capture sport. Tom Bradshaw argues that it is the writing around sport rather than about sport that is often the most profound, perceptive, and beautiful, and which tells us much about what it is to be human.