Playing at Monarchy: Sport as Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century France
Corry Cropper
University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
EAN 9780803217737
Présentation de l'éditeur :
For centuries sports have been used to mask or to uncoverimportant social and political problems, and there is no better exampleof this than France during the nineteenth century, when it changed frommonarchy to empire to republic. Prior to the French Revolution, sportsand games were the exclusive domain of the nobility. The revolution,however, challenged the notion of noble privilege, and leisureactivities began spreading to all levels of society. Games eitherevolved from Old Regime spectacles into bourgeois pastimes, such ashunting, or died out altogether, as did trictrac. During this period,sports and games became the symbolic cultural battlefield of anemerging modern state.
Playing at Monarchylooks at the ways sports and games (tennis, fencing, bullfighting,chess, trictrac, hunting, and the Olympics) are metaphorically used todefend and subvert, to praise and mock both class and political powerstructures in nineteenth-century France. Corry Cropper examines whatshaped these games of the nineteenth-century and how they appeared asallegory in French literature (in the fiction of Balzac, Mérimée,Flaubert, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and others), and in newspapers, historical studies, and even gamemanuals. Throughout, he shows how the representation of play in alltypes of literature mirrors the most important social and politicalrifts in postrevolutionary France, while also serving as propaganda forcompeting political agendas. Though its focus is on France, Playing at Monarchy hints at the way these nineteenth-century developments inform perceptions of sport even today.
Corry Cropper is an associate professor of French studies at BrighamYoung University and the author of several articles published in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, the French Review, and French Literature Series.