This Artful Sport

Two of America’s foremost fly-fishing authors join forces in this unique book offering guidance to others who aspire to write about fly fishing. Paul Schullery and Steve Raymond, both members of the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame, have separately written many fly-fishing books, both fiction and nonfiction, and edited three fly-fishing magazines. Here they offer the benefit of their many years of experience to help others who aspire to write about the sport, including everything you need to know about developing your personal writing style, how to write and sell fly-fishing magazine articles or books, how to find publishers, how to promote and sell your work, or how to self-publish.

Upon first consideration, sport and art seem to occupy separate, even opposing, realms--sport, associated with physical prowess, and art, with the highest reaches of the human mind. But because sport is such a powerful metaphor for so many human experiences, it has found its way into artistic traditions all over the world. Part One of this book provides a basic understanding of sport as symbol. Part Two gives attention to animals as adversaries and traces the origins of sporting art back to the hunt. Part Three considers humans competing against humans in combat sports, ball games, stick-and-ball games, and racquet sports, as well as in warfare. Part Four concentrates on contesting with oneself in races and sports of grace and beauty such as gymnastics, figure skating and ice dancing. The book concludes with a discussion of the athlete's relationships to society.

Sport and Art explores relationship of sport to art. It does not argue that sport is one of the arts, but rather that sport and art hold common ground. Both are ways in which humans confront philosophical challenges, though they do this through very different media. While art deploys sensual media such as paint or sound, sport is the pursuit of a physical challenge at which the athlete may fail. This is to propose, in an argument that has its roots in Hegel’s aesthetics, that sport may be interpreted as a way of reflecting upon metaphysical and normative issues, such as the nature of human freedom, fate and chance, and even our sense of space and time. This argument is developed by proposing the concept of a ‘sportworld’, an ‘atmosphere of theory’ and a ‘knowledge of history’ through which an event is interpreted and thereby constituted as sport. Ultimately, Sport and Art argues that in order to be truly appreciated, sport must be understood within a modernist aesthetics. That is to say that sport is not about beauty, but rather about the struggle to find meaning in sporting triumph and crucially sporting failure. This book was published as a special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

As the world turns its attention to sport in Olympic year, this high profile artist shares his expertise, covering all the basics of drawing, painting and depicting sports heroes and anonymous figures in sporting action.

The Artful Species explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature. Our humanoid forerunners displayed aesthetic sensibilities hundreds of thousands of years ago and the art standing of prehistoric cave paintings is virtually uncontested. In Part One, Stephen Davies analyses the key concepts of the aesthetic, art, and evolution, and explores how they might be related. He considers a range of issues, including whether animals have aesthetic tastes and whether art is not only universal but cross-culturally comprehensible. Part Two examines the many aesthetic interests humans take in animals and how these reflect our biological interests, and the idea that our environmental and landscape preferences are rooted in the experiences of our distant ancestors. In considering the controversial subject of human beauty, evolutionary psychologists have traditionally focused on female physical attractiveness in the context of mate selection, but Davies presents a broader view which decouples human beauty from mate choice and explains why it goes more with social performance and self-presentation. Part Three asks if the arts, together or singly, are biological adaptations, incidental byproducts of nonart adaptations, or so removed from biology that they rate as purely cultural technologies. Davies does not conclusively support any one of the many positions considered here, but argues that there are grounds, nevertheless, for seeing art as part of human nature. Art serves as a powerful and complex signal of human fitness, and so cannot be incidental to biology. Indeed, aesthetic responses and art behaviors are the touchstones of our humanity.

A detailed study of sports' arrival, spread and advance in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. A selection of articles addresses critical issues of nationalism, communalism, commercialism and gender through the lens of sport. This book makes the point that the social histories of South Asian sport cannot be understood by simply looking at the history of the game in one province or region. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it would be wrong to understand sport in terms of the exigencies of the colonial state. Drawing inspiration from C.L.R. James' well-known epigram, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' the findings suggest that South Asian sport makes sense only when it is placed within the broader colonial and post-colonial context. The book demonstrates that sport not only influences politics and vice versa, but that the two are inseparable. Sport is not only political, it is politics, intrigue, culture and art. To deny this is to denigrate the position of sport in modern South Asian society. This volume was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.