Reading Football by Michael Oriard & Alan Trachtenberg
How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle
American football is a great public spectacle with an immense following. The author of this book aims to show how the press projected it: football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, and as a game of rules and their infringements.Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard, a former professional player, asks these and other intriguing questions in "Reading Football," the first contemporary book about football's formative years. American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular newspapers and magazines. Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football's early years developed many different stories about what the game "meant": football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a game of rules and their infringements. He shows how football became a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and deception. These different interpretations have been magnified by football's current omnipresence on television. According to Oriard, televised football now plays a cultural role of enormous importance for men, yet within the field of cultural studies the influence of football has been ignored until now. |
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| Author(s) : Michael Oriard & Alan Trachtenberg | Format : Paperback Book |
| ISBN-10 : 0807847518 | ISBN-13 : 9780807847510 |
| RRP : £14.50 | Best available price : £ / $ |
| Prices as of : BST check live prices | |
Product Details:
Series Title : Cultural Studies of the United States
Country Publication : United States
Publication Date : 31/08/1998
Publisher : The University of North Carolina Press
Page Length : 352mm
Page Size : 240mm