Abstract
This article addresses the specificity of French sports fiction of the interwar years, chronicling its fortunes through analysis of key polemical responses to a corpus of texts all but ignored in canonical histories of French literature. The focus is on two case studies: the writing career of GéoCharles (1892–1963), who was awarded the gold medal for literature at the Paris Olympics of 1924; and boxing fiction, a sub‐genre popularised by contemporary boxing mania. Géo‐Charles yields insights into writers’ motivations in their attempts to create a literature of sport and the debates which raged among them, and boxing fiction shows what was at stake in this literary experiment. Overall, sports literature, though promoted as avant‐gardism, yielded a largely didactic and old‐fashioned body of texts, of more importance for attitudes towards the body than for literature.
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