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Sport, War and the British: 1850 to the present

Donaldson, Peter (2020) Sport, War and the British: 1850 to the present. Routledge Research in Sports History . Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 192 pp. ISBN 978-0-367-34078-0. E-ISBN 978-0-367-34078-0. (KAR id:80590)

Abstract

Spanning the colonial campaigns of the Victorian age to the War on Terror after 9/11, this study explores the role sport was perceived to have played in the lives and work of military personnel, and examines how sporting language and imagery were deployed to shape and reconfigure civilian society’s understanding of conflict.

From 1850 onwards war reportage – complemented and reinforced by a glut of campaign histories, memoirs, novels and films – helped create an imagined community in which sporting attributes and qualities were employed to give meaning and order to the chaos and misery of warfare. This work explores the evolution of the Victorian notion that playing-field and battlefield were connected and then moves on to investigate the challenges this belief faced in the twentieth century, as combat became, initially, industrialised in the age of total warfare and, subsequently, professionalised in the post-nuclear world. Such a longitudinal study allows, for the first time, new light to be shed on the continuities and shifts in the way the ‘reality’ of war was captured in the British popular imagination.

Item Type: Book
Uncontrolled keywords: sport, war, media
Subjects: D History General and Old World
D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User: Peter Donaldson
Date Deposited: 15 Apr 2020 16:41 UTC
Last Modified: 28 Sep 2021 16:10 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/80590 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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