The Visual in Sport

This comprehensive, novel and exciting interdisciplinary collection brings together leading international authorities from the history of sport, social history, art history, film history, design history, visual culture studies and related fields to explore the ways in which sport and the visual have inter-related in the past. These authorities seek to radically extend the existing knowledge of the history of sport, setting new agendas and asking new questions. Their focus is on the many value-laden visual sources that have previously been under-examined and under-exploited by historians, and they subject these to clearly focused and rigorous scrutiny. The studies range across an impressively wide variety of sources, including sports trophies, posters, photographs, stamps, paintings, club crests, monuments, films, olympic art and political cartoons and their potent cultural backgrounds, multiple meanings and social influences. Iconic statues of sporting heroes and heroines, landscape-dominating stadium architecture, memorable sports films and fascinating photographs of movingly emotional moments are also all carefully scrutinized. The collection provides original, powerful and stimulating insight into: the sheer variety and importance of visual material available for analysis, and its purposes the reasons why the critical study of this imagery assists the knowledge and understanding of culture and sport the strengths and limitations of the visual archive of sport a variety of new approaches and interpretations Sport has become central to modern popular culture. This collection allows researchers, publishers and others with an interest in sport to move beyond traditional text-based scholarship and appreciate the powerful imagery of sport in new ways. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.