Cricket, Fiction and Nation

Explores how cricket has been portrayed in fiction from the 19th century to the 21st, examining shifts in the treatment of national, post-colonial and global themes.

Cricket, Fiction and Nation examines how cricket has been used by fiction writers from the early nineteenth century to the present day to explore matters such as national identity, class, sexuality, murder, suicide, obsession, empire, race, migration and the global post-colonial world.

Cricket, Fiction and Nation traces the historic arc of fiction dealing with cricket from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its emergence in the early twentieth century as a form of serious literature, its subsequent decline into genre writing and its rejuvenation in the global world of the twenty-first century. The writers discussed include Mary Russell Mitford, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Dorothy L. Sayers, C. Day Lewis writing as Nicholas Blake, L.P. Hartley, Simon Raven, J.L. Carr, Mike Marqusee, Nancy Spain, Caryl Phillips, Romesh Gunesekera, Anthony Quinn and Shehan Karunatilaka. It also considers how cricket has featured in the TV series Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders.