Sports History and Fiction: Reading Alan Sillitoe's 'The Match'

Abstract

Sports history continues to evolve in interesting directions that have been energetically debated elsewhere. One challenge to traditional empirical methodologies, known as the cultural paradigm or linguistic turn, focuses on language and raises questions about knowledge and representation. This has been an important redress to simplistic renderings of history that reproduce ‘evidence’ without much consideration of the situation within which it is produced, written and read. The cultural paradigm has encouraged radical, critical reflection on knowledge and methods in writing history. It has legitimised the deconstructive approach towards discourses that can show how power influences the formation of knowledge and the way people respond to textual and visual forms of representation.