ABSTRACT
Football, as a practice and a subject of representation, simultaneously offered possibilities of engagement with notions of modernity in societies that were becoming increasingly urbanised and industrialised, as well as enabling the working through of influential ideas and scientific thinking. The emergence of football literature as pulp fiction in Britain came in the 1920s, the decade that witnessed the first evidence of football literature in continental Europe, all part of a search for new directions in the wake of World War I. Longer forms of football fiction in Latin America lie towards the 'meaning' side of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's 'tension/oscillation between meaning effects and presence effects' while shorter forms may better mediate the relationship between the two. Eduardo Galeano expresses his hope that football may become an expression of literature, in which he decries the unrealised potential of 'the intensity of passions that it encapsulates and unleashes'.
