Boxing: A Cultural History

by Kasia Boddy

Boxing is one of the oldest and most exciting of its bruising and bloody confrontations have permeated Western culture since 3000 BC. During that period, there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or naked fists to one other. Throughout this history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of it all.

 

In her encyclopaedic investigation, Kasia Boddy sheds new light on an elemental sports and struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Boddy examines the shifting social, political and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, and shows how from Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boxing explores the way in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media, from cinema to radio to pay-per-view. The book also offers an intriguing new perspective on the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding, Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin, Philip Roth, James Joyce, Mae West, Bertolt Brecht, and Charles Dickens.

 

An all-encompassing study, Boxing  ultimately reveals to us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

 

Genres: History, Sports, Nonfiction, Martial Arts

480 pages, Hardcover

First published April 16, 2008

About the author

Kasia Boddy teaches in the English Department at University College London. She has written extensively on twentieth-century American literature.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not so much a cultural history, in the conventional senses of ideas and practices, of the quotidian bases of boxing, or of boxing's various zeitgeists, as a history of cultural representations of boxing. Boddy's grasp of the range of contexts within which these various representations were produced is impressive: although she is understandably stronger on USA contexts (her specialist area as a literature scholar), her grasp of contexts as diverse as ancient Greece and Regency England induces envy. Boxing, like cricket, is one of the few sports that has attracted high culture, literary and artistic, representations and followers. Boddy traces and explores commonalities and differences in these through Georgian England to the US masculinists (Hemmingway, London and so on) and then on to more contemporary artists in film, journalism, letters, and fine arts. It is an impressive and weighty tome (literally, the hardback comes in at about 2kg) that deserves to be widely read, critiqued, revised and revisited – but I doubt that historians of boxing, and cultural historians of sport, as well as analysts of popular and many aspects of high culture will be able to by-pass it.

[Justin Jayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty middle of the road on this one. Boddy does a great job of giving some comprehensive looks at the history of where art and boxing have intersected and for my research purposes that was exactly what I wanted. Still I can't help but feel like this book really dragged it's feet in certain sections and stretched to explain why some writer a few hundred years ago decided to use boxing metaphors to punch-up their writing (get it?). Also for how many splendid, relatively unknown works of art there are in this book, their impact is severely diminished by the fact that my edition was printed in black and white. I went to save one piece to reference later and when I looked it up I was absolutely blown away by the use of color in the painting.

Ultimately this book is at its best when it's talking about how boxers or cultures at the time affected the artists around them and not when it goes off on page-lomg tangents about how a specific event is vaguely relevant to something else. Muhammed Ali may be one of the most interesting, significant sports figures in all of history.

[Alex Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant nuanced look at boxing's cultural and historical development and it's impact on art, literature, intellectual debate and politics. Primarily rooted in British and American sources, this book really comes alive as it discusses the 'golden age' of early to mid 20th Century boxing. Boddy's writing absolutely fizzes as she builds a timeline from Jack Johnson in 1911 through Joe Louis and Muhammed Ali and the cultural framework anchored by these three key individuals. Her writing on ethnicity and it's tightly coded relationship with the semantics and dialectics of boxing is brilliantly written, especially when it comes to the Harlem Renaissance and Phillip Roth's conceptions around Jewishness and Boxing.

[Richard Wolff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very scholarly overview of representations of boxing in society and the arts over the ages, focusing on boxing's varying cultural uses and meanings. Some of the references will be very familiar to readers, others are likely to be obscure - and that breadth is partly what makes this such a valuable resource. For its publication date, it might have included more very recent references to boxing. Nonetheless, I can't imagine anyone with an intellectual interest in boxing, beyond simply the history of famous fighters and fights (many of which are included herein anyway), not appreciating this magnum opus. Not a light read, but definitely worth the effort.

[Zane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for research, but it is well-done and gives a fun overview of how boxing has been used to represent different struggles through art, books, film, music, and cultural artifacts in general. Everything from Joe Louis' influence on a young Malcolm X to boxing and Brecht's plays, to Futurists use of the boxer in their art, to Boxing in Film Noir. It's also chock full of high quality color reproductions of many of the visual works as well. The back has a filmography with dates. Nice resource for anyone interested in Boxing history.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

It read more like a thesis on Boxing. I found some of the book not to be based on fact or fancy. The history of boxing is much older than Kasia gives credit. This alone made much of the factual unbelievable. But the amount of detail without emotion is staggering. The book is so well referenced. I am keeping a copy as long as I have a place to put it.

[Beth]

If you are interested in the sport at all - this is a keeper!

[Velvetink]

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