Echoing Greens
About This Book
Cricket has held a place in English art and literature for a thousand years. Across the centuries, artists and writers have treated its look and sound as part of the English landscape, as essential as the hills and meadows painted by Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. The white-clad players, the crack of bat on ball, the booming appeals, the polite applause, the bowler running in and the batsman leaning, waiting and swinging all recur in their work. This story has been told in part before, but never in full. Echoing Greens traces it from medieval manuscript illustrations through a wide range of visual art, poetry, fiction and drama, up to recent portraits of contemporary cricketing heroes, and it turns up forgotten tales and overlooked details along the way. Brendan Cooper examines the bond between cricket and the English imagination. He argues that behind comfortable, patriotic notions of 'English values' lies a wilder and more complicated picture. Next to stories of heroes, noble ideals and pastoral idylls, the art and literature of cricket also deal with vice, violence and scandal. By investigating what lies behind these representations, the book asks readers to reconsider the history of the game itself.
ISBN: 9781408719459
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