ABSTRACT
The essays in this volume have engaged variously with the cultural representations of sport, complicating and extending our sense of sport itself as a cultural phenomenon. As mimetic practice, as aesthetic object, as imaginative release, sport is analogous to literature and the other arts; at the same time, it can become the subject of literary, visual or musical elaborations. Historically, this network of interdependence provides an important means of understanding human societies and their attitudes to what Marcel Mauss famously called 'the techniques of the body'. 1 As this collection shows, such an analysis is as relevant to classical Greece as it is to contemporary Japan. The pioneering research of J.A. Mangan had already established the history of sport as a field of academic enquiry, but less attention has hitherto been paid to the literature surrounding sport, and its complex role in the social mediation of sports culture. If the contents of this volume go some way towards filling that gap, our purpose will have been achieved.
