'More Mighty Than the Bat, the Pen [...]': Culture, Hegemony and the Literaturisation of Cricket

Since 1919, when Neville Cardus began writing on cricket for the Manchester Guardian under the nom de plume of Cricketer, his deeply nostalgic and stylistically-florid representations of cricket have afforded him a revered status in the sport's literary canon. By writing cricket into the category of aesthetic, Cardus mediated both his perceptions of causal effect of modern technological processes on cultural production, and his uneasy relationship with sport. The debate surrounding the aesthetics of bodily performance in cricket during the period are manifest in the discourse concerning the two-eyed stance. Writings on Frank Woolley also suggest that cricket discourse could mediate many of the cultural and ideological tensions of the period. Woolley was a professional left-handed batsman for Kent and England whose career spanned the Great War. Cardus's response to modernity was also manifest in the major contribution he made to the literary construction of a late Victorian and Edwardian Golden Age of cricket.