Pour le Sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature

This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define “physical culture” as the systematic care for and development of the physique, and interpret it to include not only sport in the modern sense, but also all the athletic activities that preceded it or relate to it, such as bodily forms of exercise, leisure, and artistic creation. Our essays pursue diverse interpretive approaches and focus on texts from a wide variety of periods (medieval to the present) and genres (short stories, novels, essays, poetry) in order to consider the fundamental—yet highly neglected—place of physical activities in literature and culture from the French-speaking world. Some of the questions the essays explore include: Does the genre “sports literature” exist in French, and if so, what are its characteristics? How do governments or other political entities mobilize sports literature? What role do narratives about sports—especially the creation of teams—play in the construction of national, regional and/or local identities? How is physical culture used in literary works for pedagogical or ideological purposes? To what extent do sports performances provide a metaphorical and figurative discourse for discussing literature and culture?

Table of Contents:
Introduction Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines Part I : Physical Activities and Games prior to the Twentieth Century Chapter 1: Avatars of Sport in Medieval and Early-Modern French Literature John McClelland Chapter 2: Are Mountaineers Romantics?: The Art of Viewing and Climbing in 19th-Century France Pierre-Olaf Schut Chapter 3: ‘Tennis Killed Me’: Sport as Failed Ritual in the Works of Prosper Mérimée Corry Cropper Part II: The Tour de France Chapter 4: Henri Desgrange, Cycling, and Modern Masculinities Rebecca Wines Chapter 5: Barthes, Blondin and the Tour de France of the Trente Glorieuses Ruadhán Cooke Part III: The Stylistics of Running and Writing Chapter 6: Dominique Braga’s Literary Stride Thomas Bauer Chapter 7: Communism, Bio-Fiction and the Olympics in Jean Echenoz’s Courir Roxanna Curto Part IV: Football Cultures Chapter 8: ‘She has a great shot!’: Representations of Sport and Gender in the French Book Series Le Petit Nicolas Cynthia Laborde Chapter 9: Kourat el Kadem: Soccer Culture in Postcolonial Francophone Algerian Texts Christa Jones Chapter 10: ‘The Gaze Always Finds Zidane’: Aesthetics and Overdetermination in Toussaint, Delbée and Gordon and Parreno Luke Healey Chapter 11: Reassessing Voivenel’s Mon Beau Rugby Keith Rathbone Chapter 12: Corporeal Conceptions: Body Politics, French Republicanism and Sport in Banlieue Literature Marshall L. Smith Chapter 13: Fighting as a Trope for Flight from Conflict: Combat Sports in Le débrouillard (N.G.M. Faye) and L’appel des arènes (Aminata Sow Fall) Christopher Hogarth About the Contributors