Download or read book Baseball Literature Culture written by Peter Carino and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indiana State University Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture has consistently produced a strong body of scholarship since its inception in 1995. This work is comprised of 18 essays from the ISU conferences of 1995 through 2001. "I Just Hit .300-Time to Renegotiate My Contract" explores how major American writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ellison have challenged the pastoral idea of baseball envisioned by Whitman. "The Durable Relic" argues that Donald Hall, one of the foremost poets of today, uses baseball in much the same way that William Butler Yeats used Irish mythology to create "frozen moments, unchanging and durable; ageless heroes, Oisin on the Island of Eternal Youth and Ruth pointing to centerfield." "Baseball, the Market and the Public" analyzes the tension between the game as a business and the game as public trust, tracking the game to its present state of overpaid players and greedy owners. "The Story of Toni Stone" considers race and gender in both the game and culture by looking at one of the most remarkable but least known women in the sport, the only one to play in the Negro Leagues. These are just four of the essays, which cover a wide variety of topics.

Download or read book The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball written by Jonathan Fraser Light and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book covers all of what might be called the cultural aspects of baseball. Biographical sketches of all Hall of Fame players, owners, executives and umpires, as well as many of the sportswriters and broadcasters who have won the Spink and Frick awards, join entries for teams, owners, commissioners and league presidents"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Baseball and American Culture written by Frank Hoffmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover baseball's role in American society! Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond is a thoughtful look at baseball's impact on American society through the eyes of the game's foremost scholars, historians, and commentators. Edited by Dr. Edward J. Rielly, author of Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, the book examines how baseball and society intersect and interact, and how the quintessential American game reflects and affects American culture. Enlightening and entertaining, Baseball and American Culture presents a multidisciplinary perspective on baseball's involvement in virtually every important social development in the United States—past and present. Baseball and American Culture examines baseball’s unique role as a sociological touchstone, presenting scholarly essays that explore the game as a microcosm for American society—good and bad. Topics include the struggle for racial equality, women’s role in society, immigration, management-labor conflicts, advertising, patriotism, religion, the limitations of baseball as a metaphor, and suicide. Contributing authors include Larry Moffi, author of This Side of Cooperstown: An Oral History of Major League Baseball in the 1950s and Crossing the Line: Black Major Leaguers, 1947-1959, and a host of presenters to the 2001 Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, including Thomas Altherr, George Grella, Dave Ogden, Roberta Newman, Brian Carroll, Richard Puerzer, and the editor himself. Baseball and American Culture features 23 essays on this fascinating subject, including: “On Fenway, Faith, and Fandom: A Red Sox Fan Reflects” “Baseball and Blacks: A Loss of Affinity, A Loss of Community” “The Hall of Fame and the American Mythology” “Writing Their Way Home: American Writers and Baseball” “God and the Diamond: The Born-Again Baseball Autobiography” Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond is an essential read for baseball fans and historians, academics involved in sports literature and popular culture, and students of American society.

Download or read book Imagining Baseball written by David McGimpsey and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack (several of which are aimed at his beloved, and beleaguered, Montreal Expos). Literary baseball may be a drastically over-analyzed subject, but, like an overachieving rookie, McGrimpsey produces a far better book on it than one would have ever thought possible." --Louis Jacobson, Washington Post "This is the most important critical book on baseball literature in many years." --Murray Sperber, author of Onward to Victory From Field of Dreams to The Natural, from baseball cards to highbrow fiction, this book explores the place of baseball in American popular culture.

Download or read book Baseball Literature Culture written by Ronald E. Kates and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2008-02-26 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture has consistently produced a strong body of scholarship since its inception in 1995. Essays presented at the 2006 and 2007 conferences are published in this work. Topics covered include early baseball journalism; sportswriting as mythology; the Henry Wiggen baseball novels; fictionalized baseball broadcasts; racism, religious fundamentalism, patriotism and Marxism; Philip Roth's The Great American Novel; Zane Grey; masculinity in Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out; Willie Mays; Northern Exposure; Salvadore Dali and surrealism; baseball's economic trendsetters; Pete Rose; baseball literature in the classroom; and Jim Bunning's perfect game, among others.

Download or read book Baseball Literature Culture written by Peter Carino and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2004-03-19 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1995, the Indiana State University Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture has provided a venue for scholars to present their research on baseball as literary subject matter and cultural institution. Nineteen essays presented at the 2002 and 2003 ISU conferences are published in this work. The essays demonstrate that baseball continues to engage scholars like no other sport, despite the game's supposed loss of stature as the national game. "A Field of Questions: W.P. Kinsella comes to Ithaca," reveals Kinsella as baseball fan and baseball writer. "'You don't play the angles, you're a sap': John Sayles, Eliot Asinof, Baseball Labor, and Chicago in 1919" examines Sayles' Eight Men Out in the context of both Asinof's historical account of the fix and Sayles' earlier and openly labor-oriented film Maetwan. "Is Baseball an American Religion?" considers three codified, sociological definitions of religion and demonstrates that to claim baseball is an American religion requires more than just a strong attraction to the game. "Baseball Immortals: Character and Performance On and Off the Field" analyzes how character and performance impact fan and media perceptions as well as in terms of a player's candidacy for the Hall of Fame. These are just a few of the essays, which cover a broad range of topics and take a variety of approaches to those topics.

Download or read book Baseball Literature Culture written by Ronald E. Kates and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture has consistently produced a strong body of scholarship since its inception in 1995. Essays presented at the 2008 and 2009 conferences are published in the present work. Topics covered include religion; class and racial dichotomies in the literature of cricket and baseball; re-reading The Natural in the 21st century; the feminist movement; Don DeLillo's Game 6; baseball in Seinfeld; Robert B. Parker; Harry Stein's Hoopla; Negro league owner Tom Wilson's impact on Nashville; Major League Baseball's postwar boom; and overwrought baseball editorials, among others.

Download or read book The Great American Novel written by Philip Roth and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—a richly imagined novel featuring America’s only homeless big-league baseball team in history delivers “shameless comic extravagance…. Roth gleefully exploits our readiness to let baseball stand for America itself" (The New York Times). Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober. If you've never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. In this ribald, wickedly satiric novel, Roth turns baseball's status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism and perfidy, ebullient wordplay and a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Download or read book Baseball Literature Culture written by Peter Carino and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-12-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indiana State University Conference on Baseball in Literature and American Culture has consistently produced a strong body of scholarship since its inception in 1995. Eighteen essays presented at the 2004 and 2005 ISU conferences are published in this work. In "Baseball is a Place: Reflections On Building a Baseball Novel," novelist Mick Cochrane discusses writing a baseball novel, using his 2002 novel Sport to exemplify the process. Tracy Collins, in "Women, American Society, and Baseball Literature in the High Cannon," examines the ways in which canonical baseball novels are obliged to exclude women. In "'A Grim Harvest': Baseball's Changing of the Guard, 1931," Steve Gietschier shows baseball progressing from the tenuous agreements of the early modern era to become a stable urban business ready to take on the challenges of the mid-century. Joan Thomas's "Baseball and America, a Timeless Love Story" muses on the ways in which fans' relationship with baseball is like that of the lover to the beloved, irrational, forgiving, even maddening but always total. Fourteen other essays on the literature and culture of the game take on topics that include Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, August Wilson's Fences, baseball's long connection with presidents, its even longer connection with tobacco, and the virtue of cheering Chicago's Cubs.

Download or read book Baseball and American Culture written by John P. Rossi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a hundred years, baseball has been woven into the American way of life. By the time they reach high school, children have learned about the struggles and triumphs of players like Jackie Robinson. Generations of family members often gather together to watch their favorite athletes in stadiums or on TV. Famous players like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Cal Ripken, and Derek Jeter have shown their athletic prowess on the field and captured the hearts of millions of fans, while the sport itself has influenced American culture like no other athletic endeavor. In Baseball and American Culture: A History, John P. Rossi builds on the research and writing of four generations of baseball historians. Tracing the intimate connections between developments in baseball and changes in American society, Rossi examines a number of topics including: the spread of the sport from the North to the South during the Civil War the impact on the sport during the Depression and World War II baseball’s expansion in the post-war years the role of baseball in the Civil Rights movement the sport’s evolution during the modern era Complimented by supplementary readings and discussion questions linked to each chapter, this book pays special attention to the ways in which baseball has influenced American culture and values. Baseball and American Culture is the ultimate resource for students, scholars, and fans interested in how this classic sport has helped shape the nation.

Download or read book Seeking the Perfect Game written by Cordelia Chávez Candelaria and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1989-09-07 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive study of baseball in American literature, Candelaria looks primarily at novels to explore how writers have used this quintessential American symbol and to examine what the metaphors and images of the fictional universe of baseball have to tell us about ourselves. Her analysis includes both juvenile and adult sports fiction and other types of literary works that draw significantly on baseball imagery. Candelaria offers a probing analysis of the progression from allegory and romanticism in the earliest baseball fiction to the realism, irony, and solipsism of contemporary narrative. Candelaria examines the origins and folklore of baseball, the development of its mythic status as the national game or pastime, as well as early literary treatments. Baseball soon emerged as a romantic and heroic metaphor in juvenile and pulp fiction and as a vehicle for ironic comedy in the work of Ring Lardner and other writers of the early decades of the twentieth century. Allusions to baseball in works by such literary masters as Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway emphasize the symbolic dimensions of the game, and its mythic possibilities have been fully exploited by more recent writers, notably Bernard Malamud in The Natural and Philip Roth in The Great American Novel. Increasingly complex levels of abstraction are characteristic of the baseball fiction of Philip Roth, Mark Harris, Jay Neugeboren, John Graham Alexander, and Robert Coover. Candelaria offers a probing analysis of the progression from allegory and romanticism in the earliest baseball fiction to the realism, irony, and solipsism of contemporary narratives. A stimulating work of literary and cultural criticism, this book will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, popular culture, American studies, and physical education, as well as to baseball enthusiasts.

Download or read book Reel Baseball written by Stephen C. Wood and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2003-01-16 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not only are movies and baseball two of America's favorite pastimes, they are integral parts of our culture. Small wonder that the two frequently merge in Hollywood's use of baseball themes, jargon, and icons. This work on baseball in the movies is organized into four sections examining different aspects of the cultural intersection between film and baseball. In the first three sections--"Baseball in Baseball Films," "Babe Ruth and the Silver Screen," and "Baseball in Non-Baseball Films"--essays by scholars in various disciplines cover such topics as symbols, the role of family, baseball as a facilitator of violence, and the American mythos. The fourth section consists of interviews with directors (such as Ron Shelton and Penny Marshall), actors (Kevin Costner, James Belushi), and baseball personnel (broadcaster Vin Scully, coach Rod Dedeaux) who have worked in baseball films. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Download or read book Invisible Ball of Dreams written by Emily Ruth Rutter and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson's momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cultural history more generally.

Download or read book Baseball Books written by Mike Shannon and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2007-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely, and wrongly, assumed that books are never so valuable as when they lie unopened before us, waiting to be read. Good books bear multiple readings, and not merely because our memories fail us; the desire to repeat a good reading experience can be its own powerful motivation. And for bibliophiles, books can also be works of art, physical objects with an aesthetic value all their own. This guide for the book-loving baseball fan is written by one of the most knowledgeable collectors in the country, author and editor Mike Shannon. Beginning with a history of baseball books and collecting, it also identifies the most sought-after titles and explains how to find them, what to pay, and how to maintain their condition.

Download or read book 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read Before They Die written by Ron Kaplan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Propounding his "small ball theory" of sports literature, George Plimpton proposed that "the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature." Of course he had the relatively small baseball in mind, because its literature is formidable--vast and varied, instructive, often wildly entertaining, and occasionally brilliant. From this bewildering array of baseball books, Ron Kaplan has chosen 501 of the best, making it easier for fans to find just the books to suit them (or to know what they're missing). From biography, history, fiction, and instruction to books about ballparks, business, and rules, anyone who loves to read about baseball will find in this book a companionable guide, far more fun than a reference work has any right to be.

Download or read book Infinite Baseball written by Alva Noë and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...Philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game. For example, he ponders how observers of baseball are less interested in what happens, than in who is responsible for what happens; every action receives praise or blame. To put it another way, in baseball - as in the law - we decide what happened based on who is responsible for what happened. Noe also explains the curious activity of keeping score: a score card is not merely a record of the game, like a video recording; it is an account of the game. Baseball requires that true fans try to tell the story of the game, in real time, as it unfolds, and thus actively participate in its creation. Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. Noe's wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths."--Dust jacket flap.

Download or read book A People s History of Baseball written by Mitchell Nathanson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball is much more than the national pastime. It has become an emblem of America itself. From its initial popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the game has reflected national values and beliefs and promoted what it means to be an American. Stories abound that illustrate baseball's significance in eradicating racial barriers, bringing neighborhoods together, building civic pride, and creating on the field of play an instructive civics lesson for immigrants on the national character. In A People's History of Baseball, Mitchell Nathanson probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism, but power--how it is obtained, and how it perpetuates itself. Through the growth and development of baseball Nathanson shows that, if only we choose to look for it, we can see the petty power struggles as well as the large and consequential ones that have likewise defined our nation. By offering a fresh perspective on the firmly embedded tales of baseball as America, a new and unexpected story emerges of both the game and what it represents. Exploring the founding of the National League, Nathanson focuses on the newer Americans who sought club ownership to promote their own social status in the increasingly closed caste of nineteenth-century America. His perspective on the rise and public rebuke of the Players Association shows that these baseball events reflect both the collective spirit of working and middle-class America in the mid-twentieth century as well as the countervailing forces that sought to beat back this emerging movement that threatened the status quo. And his take on baseball’s racial integration that began with Branch Rickey’s “Great Experiment” reveals the debilitating effects of the harsh double standard that resulted, requiring a black player to have unimpeachable character merely to take the field in a Major League game, a standard no white player was required to meet. Told with passion and occasional outrage, A People's History of Baseball challenges the perspective of the well-known, deeply entrenched, hyper-patriotic stories of baseball and offers an incisive alternative history of America's much-loved national pastime.