ABSTRACT
Sport fiction allows readers to live past athletic lives in a sensory, personal, and immersive manner that complements – and could not exist without – more traditional approaches to sport history. More traditional approaches to sport history also accomplish both the seeing and the knowing that Rowland McMaster ascribes to the literary arts. What do novelists add to the discussion of historical sporting events and figures? Drawing on the research and writing of historians, fiction writers can build multidimensional worlds and complex characters that pull readers into the lively world of story. Jamie Dopp offers a thorough consideration of the ways in which this novel enters into dialogue with sport history, particularly the circumscribed nature of women’s lives. A fiction writer is not a historian. Novelists who peer into these past stories of sport do so only by standing on the shoulders of sport historians.
