Women Characters in Baseball Literature: A Critical Study » (New Edition)

Kathleen Sullivan is a lecturer at the University of Texas at Arlington in the department of English. She lives in Arlington, Texas.

Since the early 20th century, American writers have both recorded and fictionalized the real-life activities of great athletes, as well as created original characters for sports stories. How have women fared in this literature?

Women Characters in Baseball Literature is the first comprehensive evaluation of the women characters of baseball literature, including women s crucial roles on and off the field of play. Applying several feminist theories and examining the works in the context of both myth and psychology, the author discusses baseball fiction written by both men and women. Among the topics discussed are the literary implications of motherhood; how patterns of behavior in women characters often recall Greek goddesses; and how women characters and the feminist imagination enrich the literature of this apparently masculinized sport. Authors covered include Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris, August Wilson, Lamar Herrin, Nancy Willard, Silvia Tennenbaum, Karen Joy Fowler, and others.