Cricket and Its Life Narratives

With its own unique, complex and international literary culture that straddles many different forms of biographical writing, this is the first interdisciplinary collection to investigate the links between cricket and life narrative. Concentrating on the lives of professional cricketers, but also drawing on how ‘cricketing life’ is narrated by amateurs, fans and journalists, this book unpacks and challenges cricket’s own mythic constructions of player ‘types’, examines how such roles help build player profiles and celebrity status outside the game and also explores the intimate links between cricket and issues of race, class, gender and communal or national belonging. With coverage of biographies, autobiographies, essays, diaries, memoirs, and travelogues, as well as testimonies, documentaries, podcasts and even twitter feeds, an array of international and field-leading scholars consider all major cricket-playing ‘nations’ – England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and the West Indies – and assess writing linked to some of the game’s global megastars, including Don Bradman, Viv Richards, Shane Warne, Sachin Tendulkar, Shahid Afridi and Kumar Sangakkara. With the popularity of sports life narratives, and the scant academic attention given to them, Cricket and its Life Narratives extends the domains of life writing, going to bat for the different ways in which popular, physical, cultural activities and life journeys are recounted and explained. In addition, given cricket’s crucial place in Britain’s imperial history, analysis of cricket’s life narratives casts new light on the importance of such modes of self-presentation for the development of English Literature as well as for literary studies ‘after empire’ internationally.