19th Century
21st Century
A01=Travis Vogan
arenas
Athleticism
Author_Travis Vogan
Boxing
Category=ATFA
Category=ATFG
Category=JHBS
Category=SRB
Cinema
cinematic storytelling
Culture
directors
early twenty-first century
Edison's Leonard-Cushing Fight
entertainment
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
eq_sports-fitness
Fights
Film
films
HBO Sports
late nineteenth-century
Martin Scorsese
Mass Entertainment
Media Culture
movies
Muhammad Ali
Oscar Micheaux
pop culture
popular media culture
Production
Rocky
Sports
sports hierarchy
Sports Media
sports movies
Storytelling
The Joe Louis Story
TV Fighting
United States
Product details
- ISBN 9781978801363
- Weight: 4g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Oct 2020
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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As one of popular culture's most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the medium's late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinema's most celebrated directors—from Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsese—made boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edison's Leonard-Cushing Fight to The Joe Louis Story, Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sport's meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.
TRAVIS VOGAN is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. His most recent book is ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television.
