Abstract
The most famous fictional rendition of the American Civil War is Stephen Crane's masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Lacking any experience of warfare, Crane asserted he had gained his ‘sense of the rage of conflict on the football field’, college football being a popular sport in America in the 1890s. This claim has been discussed in some detail by Christian K. Messenger (in Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction, 1981) and Bill Brown (The Material Unconscious, 1996), and both scholars find Crane's use of the football trope either inappropriate or improper. It is my contention, however, that Crane's experience of football in the 1890s pervades his narrative use of the physical, tactical and rhetorical images of the sport to recreate successfully the sights and sounds of warfare, transforming a historically frightening, confusing and chaotic event into a structured and meaningful contemporary literary experience.
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