Hockey in the Canadian Imagination: Three Books on Hockey in Literature, Culture, and History

Abstract

Hockey in Canadian Imagination: Three Books on Hockey in Literature, Culture, and History Canada's Game: Hockey and Identity. Ed. Andrew C. Holman. Montreal: McGill- Queen's University Press, 2009. 236 pp. $24.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-77353-598-5. Canadian Hockey Literature. By Jason Blake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 228 pp. $60.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-80209-984-6. $27.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-80209-713-2. Now Is Winter: Thinking about Hockey. Ed. Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison. Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn, 2009. 140 pp. $25.00 (paper) ISBN 978-1- 894987-34-9. Three recently published books on hockey in literature, culture, and history show that hockey has finally entered into academia as a subject worthy of study. It is about time: hockey has been consistently invoked as a symbol of nation arguably since its conception in late 1800s. Andrew C. Holman's edited collection of essays, Canada's Game: Hockey and Identity (2009), Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison's edited collection of essays, Now Is Winter: Thinking about Hockey (2009), and Jason Blake's monograph, Canadian Hockey Literature (2010), all engage in rigorous academic analyses of hockey and delineate hockey's complex and troubled relationship with nation. The editors and authors of these books clearly have a passion for sport, but studies not merely celebratory. The diversity of topics in these books is admirable, as is decidedly interdisciplinary nature of two edited collections. While topics range from women's shinny in Toronto parks, to representations of First Nations in hockey media, to fans' responses to trades, three themes emerge as prominent. First, hockey is mythologized, idealized, and imagined as intimately intertwined with Canadian nationalism. Second, representations of hockey embedded in often problematic cultural and historical understandings of gender and race. Third, hockey is understood as being in peril, lost or in process of being lost to corporate America, commercialization, economic interests, and spectacle. Anxiety over this perceived loss is coupled with a longing to regain a mythic past, a nostalgia for what once was-children skating on open ponds, a joining of in what Blake calls the play spirit (2010, 177). Holman's Canada's Game includes essays from scholars in fields as diverse as history, kinesiology, sport management, English, and communications. The book is divided into three parts: first part questions hockey's relationship to regional and national identities, with a historical and cultural studies focus; second part addresses hockey in relation to English-Canadian literature; and third part considers hockey as a commodity, something to be sold and bought, consumed and internalized (2009, 7). The structure of book leaves reader with a comprehensive understanding of various representations of sport: book addresses hockey from different disciplinary angles, and is not narrow or limited in scope. In his introduction, Holman explains that we must not just watch game of hockey, but read it: And to read it, scholars need to understand sport as a text that contains many narrative possibilities (6). The book explains how hockey provide meaningful and useful texts for understanding who we [Canadians] are (7), but also that it can be read in ways that make us uncomfortable, challenging us to view it anew. That hockey is intertwined with Canada as an imagined nation is clear in essays in Canada's Game. In Big Liners and Beer Gardens, for example, Greg Gillespie implies that myth of small town was central to how hockey was understood in 1936 Canada. As Gillespie explains, team that represented Canada in Olympics that year was Bear Cats, from Port Arthur, Ontario-a team that reflected community's values and small-town identity (2009, 13). With team went aspirations of a Northern Ontario community (13). …