Sport and the Literary Imagination focuses on two central concerns: how representations of sport shape our understanding of sport, and what value literary representations of sport have for the historian. Jeffrey Hill applies these considerations to an instructively eclectic range of literary texts about “sport in some form or another” (31), and the conjunction of the eight novels and one short story that centralize the seven core chapters of his study underscores the variegated ways sports signify and accrue meaning. Indeed, the proliferating effect of the divergent sports narratives Hill covers illuminates his assertion that “even the most active sport follower—s/he who plays, administers, and simply watches … cannot ‘know’ sport more than fractionally by this direct involvement. For the rest … s/he is dependent upon what s/he is told through various channels of knowledge that deal in sport” (15).

Hill's best work emerges from his treatment of football as a form of cultural ethnography in Britain. Chapter 2 addresses Robin Jenkins's The Thistle and the Grail (1954), wherein Hill sees a pessimistic hollowing out of Scottish football's signifying functions. For Hill, Jenkins resists realism and historical specificity in favor of the Kailyard, but he does so ironically to reveal through a community's investment in its local team the “convergence of … circumstances that destroyed national hope, the site where the battle for the future was lost and football took over” (51).

In chapter 4, Hill examines Brian Glanville's The Rise of Gerry Logan (1963), presenting the 1950s and 1960s modernization movement as a context for Glanville's ambivalent engagement with change in British football. Hill convincingly reads Glanville's use of form, particularly the multiple narrators who present Gerry's story, as a critique of monovocal and mythologized narratives perpetuated by sports journalists—as well as of new voices, genres, and representational modes for sport (such as television coverage and the emergence of the sport star as cultural celebrity and authority) ushered in by modernization.

In chapter 6, Hill offers a generously ambiguous reading of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch (1992), situating the memoir within the critical social commentaries vis-à-vis British football in the 1980s and 1990s. Hill notes, incisively, that Hornby is part of but ambivalent about such discourses, and he reads “mixed messages” (123) and ironies in Hornby's recounting, such as his zero-tolerance position on hooliganism coupled with his valuable tendency to not try to understand it. For Hill, Hornby's unwillingness (or inability) “to stand outside [his] subject” (132) makes his book “a vital primary source for historians working on the football culture of the late century” (132), particularly as it theorizes and articulates the game from the perspective of the participatory fan.

Hill offers two chapters on literary interrogations of sports-hero worship. Chapter 3 addresses David Storey's This Sporting Life (1960), a novel that engages the relationship between rugby stars and adoring fans. Storey's Machim seems simultaneously self-conscious of and dependent upon his constructedness as a masculine ideal, and he offers an unflinching glimpse of what fans see but nevertheless continue to admire, demanding that readers reconsider “the assumptions and relationships ingrained in sport” (72). In chapter 7, Hill examines Ring Lardner's “Champion” (1916) and its 1949 film adaptation staring Kirk Douglas. Lardner's story, contrasting blunt depictions of Kelly's cruelty against gleaming characterizations sportswriters present to the public, “caution[s] readers about the emotional commitment they place in heroes who are represented to them disingenuously” (150). For Hill, the film rewrites Kelly as more complex morally but also introduces his death as “the plot's logical poetic justice” (152).

The remaining chapters of Hill's book are somewhat disappointing in that they fail to serve the eclecticism of textual selections that might otherwise buoy his study. Hill compresses into chapter 5 overly generalized examinations of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter (1986) and Phillip Roth's American Pastoral (1997). While he touches on critical particulars (Frank Bascomb's postmodern ambivalence toward sports narratives in The Sportswriter, and the fact that “sport represents the world that has been lost” [109] in American Pasto ral), Hill offers only cursory treatment of the novels. As these books directly engage the issues with which Hill is so concerned (representations of sport and their reliability), this oversight is regrettable and confusing.

Hill's most ambitious selections—Thomas Keneally's A Family Madness (1985) and Howard Jacobsen's The Mighty Walzer (1999), which he covers in chapters 8 and 9, respectively, add significant value to his study by demonstrating nuanced literary models for sport. Hill claims that both works present sports as failed paradigms for their central characters: Terry Delaney, the Australian rugby player who, in A Family Madness, confronts a family consumed by its Belarusian origins and for whom sport is an unavailable shaping principle; and Oliver Walzer, the Ping-Pong master of The Mighty Walzer undone by his refusal to want to win as badly as his opponents, whose said desire repulses him. However, Hill introduces rather than develops these ideas.

Indeed, the core limitation of Hill's study is that he never makes any cohesive argument about why these specific literary selections matter. His book has much to offer. Drawing on and extending Michael Oriard's work on representations of American sport as constructive forces, Hill brings important attention to understudied fictions of British sport in particular; moreover, his literary selections direct us to broaden and deepen our sense for what sports fiction and sports history mean. Nevertheless, he seems too concerned in his introduction and conclusion with reviewing well-known disciplinary debates among historians, new historicists, and others: Are the “conventionally … separate spheres of ‘text’ (literature) and ‘context’ (history)” (29) necessarily separate? Is the literary text “historical evidence” (33)? By making his answers to these questions (no; yes) the outcome rather than the starting point of his book, Hill never allows himself to explore fully the implications of his core insight: “that ‘sport’ exists as much on the page as it does on the field or in the committee room” (197). Instead he tends to reduce his objectives and disperse his analyses in too many directions, without offering sufficient legibility for that potentially rewarding multidirectionality.