The Intersections of Sport History and Sport Literature: Toward a Transdisciplinary Perspective.

As scholars embraced a ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s, they began to use a vast array of new theories in these fields of knowledge with particular attention to language, symbols and systems of representation. This ‘cultural turn’ had a considerable influence on research in sports studies as historians and sociologists began to examine the cultural dimensions of sport with the viewpoint that sport is a reflection or mirror of culture a product, and sport historians began to consider a variety of sources for the writing of sport history, including creative texts, (novels most predominantly) and film in the writing of sport history. Initially, sport historians have tended to appropriate literature as yet another source for the writing of sport history, equating it with other sources such as archival material. It is contended that such a use of literature was limited by the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives of recent scholarship. It is further maintained that a transdisciplinary perspective that engages with shared knowledge that exists between sport history and sport literature enriches the work of sport historians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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