Writing the Body in Motion: A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature

by Angie Abdou (Editor), Jamie Dopp (Editor)

Overview

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.

With contributions by Jason Blake, Laura K. Davis, Cara Hedley, Paul Martin, Fred Mason, Sam McKegney, Gyllian Phillips, Trevor J. Phillips, and Cory Willard.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771992305
Publisher:	Athabasca University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
File size:	551 KB

About the Author

Angie Abdou is assistant professor of creative writing at Athabasca University and a regular book reviewer for Quill and Quire. She has published one short story collection and four novels. Her first novel, The Bone Cage, was a CBC Canada Reads finalist in 2011, defended by NHL star Georges Laraque. The novel was included on Canadian Literature magazine’s “All-Time Top Ten List of Best Canadian Sport Literature” and topped the CBC Book Club’s list of Top 10 Sport Books. Jamie Dopp is associate professor of Canadian literature at the University of Victoria, where he has taught a course in hockey and literature for a number of years. His poetry, fiction, reviews, and scholarly articles have appeared in many journals. He has published two collections of poetry and a novel and in 2009, he co-edited a collection of essays with Richard Harrison called Now is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey.
Angie Abdou is assistant professor of creative writing at Athabasca University and a regular book reviewer for Quill and Quire. She has published one short story collection and four novels. Her first novel, The Bone Cage, was a CBC Canada Reads finalist in 2011, defended by NHL star Georges Laraque. The novel was included on Canadian Literature magazine’s “All-Time Top Ten List of Best Canadian Sport Literature” and topped the CBC Book Club’s list of Top 10 Sport Books.
Jamie Dopp is associate professor of Canadian literature at the University of Victoria, where he has taught a course in hockey and literature for a number of years. His poetry, fiction, reviews, and scholarly articles have appeared in many journals. He has published two collections of poetry and a novel and in 2009, he co-edited a collection of essays with Richard Harrison called Now is the Winter: Thinking about Hockey.

Read an Excerpt

From the introduction: According to Don Morrow, who taught one of Canada’s first Sport Lit courses at the University of Western Ontario, Sport Literature is never just about sport. Rather, it explores the human condition using sport as the dominant metaphor. Similarly, Priscila Uppal, perhaps the most well-known Canadian scholar and writer to focus her attention on this topic, explains that the best sport literature does not focus exclusively on sport as sport; rather, in this literature, sport functions as “metaphor, paradigm, a way to experience some of the harsher realities of the world, a place to escape to, an arena from which endless lessons can be learned, passed on, learned again” (xiv). Many of the essays in this collection, therefore, examine the various ways sport functions metaphorically. Our authors also consider various recurring themes of sport literature, including: sport and the body; sport and violence; sport and gender; sport and society; sport and sexuality; sport and heroism; sport and the father/son relationship; sport and memory; sport and the environment; sport and redemption; sport and mortality; sport as religion; sport as quest; sport as place; and sport literature and intertextuality.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Angie Abdou

1. W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe: Real People and Fantasy Quests / Fred Mason
2. The Myth of Hockey and Identity in Paul Quarrington’s King Leary / Cara Hedley
3. Hockey, Humour, and Play in Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans / Jason Blake
4. The Poetry of Hockey in Richard Harrison’s Hero of the Play / Paul Martin
5. Glaciers, Embodiment, and the Sublime: An Ecocritical Approach to Thomas Wharton’s Icefields / Cory Willard
6. Hockey, Zen and the Art of Bill Gaston's The Good Body / Jamie Dopp
7. The Darkening Path: The Hero-Athlete Reconsidered in Angie Abdou's The Bone Cage / Gyllian Phillips
8. “Open the door to the roaring darkness”: The Enigma of Terry Sawchuk in Randall Maggs’s Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems / Paul Martin
9. From Tank to Deep Water: Myth and History in Samantha Warwick's Sage Island / Jamie Dopp
10. Identity and the Athlete: Alexander MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile” / Laura K Davis
11. Decolonizing the Hockey Novel: Ambivalence and Apotheosis in Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse / Sam McKegney and Trevor J. Phillips

Contributors