Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Cricket pastoral and Englishness
- 2 Cricket in the eighteenth century
- 3 Corruption in cricket
- 4 Broadcasting and cricket in England
- 5 Bodyline, Jardine and masculinity
- 6 Don Bradman: just a boy from Bowral
- 7 The Packer cricket war
- 8 New Zealand cricket and the colonial relationship
- 9 C. L. R. James and cricket
- 10 Reading Brian Lara and the traditions of Caribbean cricket poetry
- 11 The detachment of West Indies cricket from the nationalist scaffold
- 12 The Indian Premier League and world cricket
- 13 Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture
- 14 Conflicting loyalties: nationalism and religion in India–Pakistan cricket relations
- 15 Cricket and representations of beauty: Newlands Cricket Ground and the roots of apartheid in South African cricket
- 16 Writing the modern game
- 17 Cricket and international politics
- Further reading
- Index
1 - Cricket pastoral and Englishness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Cricket pastoral and Englishness
- 2 Cricket in the eighteenth century
- 3 Corruption in cricket
- 4 Broadcasting and cricket in England
- 5 Bodyline, Jardine and masculinity
- 6 Don Bradman: just a boy from Bowral
- 7 The Packer cricket war
- 8 New Zealand cricket and the colonial relationship
- 9 C. L. R. James and cricket
- 10 Reading Brian Lara and the traditions of Caribbean cricket poetry
- 11 The detachment of West Indies cricket from the nationalist scaffold
- 12 The Indian Premier League and world cricket
- 13 Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture
- 14 Conflicting loyalties: nationalism and religion in India–Pakistan cricket relations
- 15 Cricket and representations of beauty: Newlands Cricket Ground and the roots of apartheid in South African cricket
- 16 Writing the modern game
- 17 Cricket and international politics
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
English cricket has been portrayed in a substantial body of imaginative literature as quintessentially southern, rural and amateur. In this way English cricket pastoral has become an enduring cultural myth that obscures any sense of the game as a highly rationalised and commercialised national and international sport, as it has been for over two centuries. Even when cricket had spread to the industrial centres of Victorian Britain and to the various parts of the British Empire, its literary image remained an overwhelmingly rural one. The rural cricket field, imaginatively at least, could be transported to the most alien urban and colonial environment to fulfil its cultural work. Not least among the reasons for this was the belief that the mythical notion of Anglo-Saxon racial purity resided in the English countryside. At the same time these representations consistently presented a nostalgic ideal based on both social hierarchy and social harmony. This mythical ideal of English cricket was thus profoundly conservative, a vision of Englishness in which ‘organic’ rural custom betokens ‘organic’ social order. Through a discussion of prose, poetry and fiction, this chapter traces the emergence and development of cricket pastoral between 1820 and the present day. In doing so it suggests that, though a consistent feature of the sport's literary tradition, cricket pastoral has tended to flourish during periods of accelerated social change or perceived national and imperial crisis, periods when collectivist concepts of Englishness were deployed within other forms of literary discourse as imaginary resolutions to such tensions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Cricket , pp. 11 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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