British bodies between extraversion and conservatism: representations and movements during the first half of the twentieth century

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Serval ID
serval:BIB_4EDAD1FCA7FE
Type
A part of a book
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
British bodies between extraversion and conservatism: representations and movements during the first half of the twentieth century
Title of the book
Education and the Body in Europe (1900-1950)
Author(s)
Quin Grégory
Publisher
Peter Lang
Publication state
Published
Issued date
15/01/2021
Editor
Polenghi Simonetta, Németh András, Kasper Tomàs
Pages
109-120
Language
english
Abstract
Can the body history of the Great Britain help us to understand the Brexit? If the question is very ambitious and goes far beyond the contents of this contribution, our ambition is to understand how several socio-political and more cultural and economics processes influenced the construction of representations of a ‘national’ body in the late nineteenth century and until the 1950s. Great Britain being the ‘homeland’ of the modern sports and those practices being there codified and developed within the Public Schools, is something that historiography already clearly emphasised since almost half a century and several seminal works from Norbert Elias, Eric Dunning, or later Richard Holt and Matthew Taylor. Modern sports’ bodies are about unlimited progress and speediness, in a world framed by the processes of colonisation and of the rise of capitalism. Thus, it is important to notice that sports are not a passive consequence of the rise of capitalism and liberalism, they contribute to fuel and structure the landscape of the new societies, not only putting some stadiums at the margins of the cities but also writing in the bodies, representations and behaviours some characteristics of this progress. It is then even more ‘efficient’ as a way to diffuse and promote some views, as it has the appearance of being a simple game. Here, our ambition is to highlight several moments, relevant to understand not only sports history in Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, but also some more deep representations that creates, continually updates and binds a ‘British collective mind’ together though bodies between expansion and conservatism.
Create date
29/11/2020 12:54
Last modification date
05/05/2023 6:10
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