Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture - Tapa dura

"Imagining Baseball" is a conversation about how America's pastime is fictionalized in a variety of cultural products. Moving from traditionally 'high-brow' materials to pop culture artifacts, "Imagining Baseball" offers a critique and an endorsement of baseball's cultural allure. Declaring a relationship between the fan and the cultural critic, between the business of baseball and the poetry of the green fields, "Imagining Baseball" presents an informed and accessible overview of baseball fiction's place in the entertainment industry.From George Will editorials to an episode of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman", from stadium design to small press literary fiction, from the Pete Rose controversy to Robert Redford in "The Natural", baseball's cultural products offer a unique vantage to view intersections of rhetorical strategy. Baseball's cultural products are grounded in the realities of Major League baseball and often use the same tropes to celebrate alleged virtues of the game.These tropes baseball as perfect, baseball as pastoral, baseball as e pluribus unum, baseball as father-son reunion prove durable because they also express baseball's loathed realities baseball as fixed, baseball as big city, baseball as Christian boys' club, baseball as father-son antagonism. With strong attention to the authority placed upon the 'literary' in cultural products, "Imagining Baseball" questions traditional assertions about baseball, particularly ones which imagine the sport as superior to other sports and more literate than other items from American popular culture. With an ear for the traditional concerns of the fan, of anything chosen to be called 'baseball fiction'. Offering in-depth analysis of baseball-related texts and their relationship to the cultural marketplace, "Baseball as American Fiction" pushes the boundaries of sport literature with wit and careful insight.

David McGimpsey completed his PhD in English Literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. An author of poetry, fiction and popular culture criticism, he currently lives and works in Montreal.