Alexis Tadié – författare

Sport studies and sports history have witnessed a recent substantial increase in publications. However, the relationship between literature and sport has been little explored. Sport, Literature, Society looks at a wide variety of case studies ranging from Japan to England, from India to Australia and covers sports as diverse as cycling, football, wrestling and boxing. It concentrates on historical perspectives. The contributors are all academics of international reputation and include historians of sport and literary scholars.Literature may shape our perceptions and reactions to sport as much as sport may inform our reading. 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. Literature often conceptualises the place and role of sport in culture and society. Indeed, sport inhabits literature in ways that have not been adequately studied. Sport studies have investigated the relationships between sport and society, education, gender, nation, and class. To look again at these relationships through the prism of literature enables us to change our focus and to assess the centrality of sport in culture.This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, or Battle of the Books as it was known in England, famously pitted the Ancients on the one side and the Moderns on the other. This book presents a new intellectual history of the dispute, in which authors explore its manifestations across Europe in the arts and sciences, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.By paying close attention to local institutional contexts for the Querelle, contributors yield a complex picture of the larger debate. In intellectual life, authors uncover how the debate affected the publication of antiquarian scholarship, and how it became part of discussions in London coffee houses and the periodical press. Authors also position the Low Countries as the true pivot for a modernistic realignment of intellectual method, with concomitant rather than centralised developments in England and France. The volume is particularly concerned with the realisation of the Querelle in the realm of artistic and technical practice. Marrying modern approaches with ancient sympathies was fraught with difficulties, as contributors attest in analyses on musical writing, painting and the ‘querelle du coloris’, architectural practice and medical rhetorics. Tracing the deeper cultural resonances of the dispute, authors conclude by revealing how it fostered a new tendency to cultural self-reflection throughout Europe. Together, these contributions demonstrate how the Querelle acted as a leading principle for the configuration of knowledge across the arts and sciences throughout the early modern period, and also emphasise the links between historical debates and our contemporary understanding of what it means to be ‘modern’.

This study addresses the intricate links between oral culture and literate culture in the eighteenth century. Tadié traces how perceptions and representations of language move from a dominance of the spoken work to a dominance of the written word; and this is echoed in the order of the five chapters on conversation, gesture, theatre, fiction, and print. Tadié offers a reading of Sterne's works, arguing that the use of language lies at the centre of Sterne's art; he approaches the historical dimension of the texts in the context of eighteenth-century theories of language. He brings into focus the heterogeneity of Sterne's texts; and he demonstrates how Sterne's awareness for the variations of language links up with his interest in the form of the book, and with the use of all the potentialities of print. The study broaches the issue of the 'rise of the novel' in the eighteenth century. it refuses the idea of progress, or of slow emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century, which would lead progressively from Defoe to the Fielding-Richardson debate, to a possible view of Sterne as the great ironist of the form of the novel. Tadié asserts that Sterne's writings do not simply address the nature of the novel, but they engage with all the forms of language representation made available by the culture of the age.

Sport studies and sports history have witnessed a recent substantial increase in publications. However, the relationship between literature and sport has been little explored. Sport, Literature, Society looks at a wide variety of case studies ranging from Japan to England, from India to Australia and covers sports as diverse as cycling, football, wrestling and boxing. It concentrates on historical perspectives. The contributors are all academics of international reputation and include historians of sport and literary scholars.Literature may shape our perceptions and reactions to sport as much as sport may inform our reading. 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. Literature often conceptualises the place and role of sport in culture and society. Indeed, sport inhabits literature in ways that have not been adequately studied. Sport studies have investigated the relationships between sport and society, education, gender, nation, and class. To look again at these relationships through the prism of literature enables us to change our focus and to assess the centrality of sport in culture.This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The uses of fiction in early modern Europe are far more varied than is often assumed by those who consider fiction to be synonymous with the novel. The contributors to this volume demonstrate the significant role that fiction plays in early modern European culture, not only in a variety of its literary genres, but also in its formation of philosophical ideas, political theories, and the law. The volume explores these uses of fiction in a series of interrelated case studies, ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution and examining the work of, among others, Montaigne, Corneille, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Diderot. It asks: Where does fiction live, and thrive? Under what conditions, and to what ends? It suggests that fiction is best understood not as a genre or a discipline but, instead, as a frontier: one that demarcates literary genres and disciplines of knowledge and which, crucially, allows for the circulation of ideas between them.

In the eighteenth century sport as we know it emerged as a definable social activity. Hunting and other country sports became the source of significant innovations in visual art; racing and boxing generated important subcultures; and sport’s impact on good health permeated medical, historical, and philosophical writings.Sporting Cultures, 1650–1850 is a collection of essays that charts important developments in the study of sport in the eighteenth century. Editors Daniel O’Quinn and Alexis Tadié have gathered together an array of European and North American scholars to critically examine the educational, political, and medical contexts that separated sports from other physical activities. The volume reveals how the mediation of sporting activities, through match reports, pictures, and players, transcended the field of aristocratic patronage and gave rise to the social and economic forces we now associate with sports.  In Sporting Cultures, 1650–1850 , O’Quinn and Tadié successfully lay the groundwork for future research on the complex intersection of power, pleasure, and representation in sports culture.

The age of Enlightenment was also an age of development of sporting and physical activities. This book aims to study the forms of sociability induced and defined by such activities in the eighteenth century. By bringing together archival work and textual analysis the book insists on the definitions and representations of sporting practices. These range from traditional pastimes such as hunting or archery, to more novel forms of recreation such as swimming or mountaineering. The book investigates the modes of association which were set in motion either through participation, or through various forms of spectatorship (ranging from watching to betting). Societies, associations, clubs, and more informal gatherings characterised this burgeoning interest for sports. They provoked new interactions between individuals and the social group, new forms of distinction as well, and transformed the apprehension of the natural world. Through a variety of case studies, the book provides an original perspective on the transformations of sociability in the eighteenth century. It integrates the findings of historical inquiry into groups and associations linked with sports as well as the analysis of the literary projections of such physical activities, notably by the Romantic poets from Thomson to Keats.