Boxing: A Cultural History

Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, songwriters, photographers and film-makers have recorded and made sense of boxing. In her encyclopaedic investigation of the shifting social, political and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the way in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media, and sheds new light on the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens. This all-encompassing study tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

This paperback edition contains a new preface by the author.

‘A penetrating, sparky and powerfully intelligent work of artistic, sporting and cultural history … when you get to its final page you will find that you have not merely been entertained but enlightened, too. A literary knockout.’ - The Times Sports Books of the Year

‘A treasure trove for boxing historians and aficionados…At nearly five hundred densely packed pages…Boxing: A Cultural History would seem to include everything that has ever been written, depicted or in any way recorded about boxing…To read Boddys book is to confront dozens hundreds? of inspired mini-essays.’ - Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

‘Compendious, and thoroughly fascinating…an excellent, well-written and beautifully illustrated book.’ - Daily Telegraph