Sports are the most popular spectator events in the history of the world. This volume demonstrates how sports shape societies and individuals. The essays offer critical new insights and historical case studies from historians, theorists, literature scholars, and athletes.

John Zilcosky is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
Burks Marlo A. :

Marlo Alexandra Burks is an independent scholar and recent postdoctoral Fellow in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

"The fascination of sport in all its richness and ambivalence has hardly ever been explored so deeply. Magnificent!"

Alexander Regier, Department of English, Rice University:

"Zilcosky and Burks have put together a timely collection of exceptional quality. The Allure of Sports in Western Culture evidences the growing importance of sports studies as a field that urges us to think through some of the most pressing questions of ethics and aesthetics. It shows how sports play a key role in historical subject formations and illuminates how the cultural as well as political events that institutionalize this practice are central to our modern self-understanding. The contributions make clear that scholars across the humanities have much to profit from thinking about the allure of sports."

Andrew James Johnston, Freie Universität Berlin:

"The Allure of Sports in Western Culture brings together a collection of insightful investigations into the qualities, both ethical and aesthetic, that have constituted the fascination of sports from classical antiquity to the present day. Observed from a broad variety of perspectives, the essays in this volume address the entangled forms of desire – for beauty, for ugliness, for losing one’s individuality – that combine to make sports one of the most significant cultural activities of the West."