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The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games, by Nancy Fix Anderson; pp. xxvii + 213. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 2010, $44.95, £31.95.
Cricket, Literature and Culture: Symbolising the Nation, Destabilising Empire, by Anthony Bateman; pp. vii + 236. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, £55.00, $99.95.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht declared in his In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006) that, "in global academia, sports' as a social or a cultural phenomenon is at best a marginal topic" ([The Press of Harvard University], 21). If academics declare themselves to be sports fans, the reception by colleagues, Gumbrecht observes, "is difficult to distinguish from a narcissistic type of condescension" (21). Gumbrecht offers possible explanations, but they do not alter the fact that in the academy today sports and athletics have little status as academic subjects. Nancy Fix Anderson and Anthony Bateman resist this trend with books that analyze sports as important social and political phenomena.
Anderson's The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games is part of the Victorian Life and Times series edited by Sally Mitchell. Anderson's primary aim is to explain how the Victorians "reshaped their traditional sports, eliminating some while modernizing others, and created new sports, with their games so penetrating all layers of their society, that the English became known throughout the world as a sports-playing nation" (xv). The first chapter, "English Sports before the Victorians," gives an information- filled history of field sports, water sports, lawn sports, pedestrianism, and blood sports in pre-industrial England. In the second chapter she explains why sports were marginalized in the early Victorian years; besides discussing urbanization, railway expansion, and economic changes, she also proposes that utilitarianism and evangelicalism were the "greatest force[s] shaping the sporting life in early-Victorian England" (25-26). These two movements changed the sporting landscape by creating the Victorian ethos that sought to limit the practice of "time-wasting, sin-inducing" activities like sports (47). In chapter 3 she moves to the mid-Victorian period and considers the ways in which sports were used in the public schools and universities as a "means of...