Bullfighting: A Troubled History - Softcover

Hardouin-Fugier, Elisabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861895186 ISBN 13: 9781861895189

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2010

Synopsis

“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon. Art? Ritual? Sport? Cruelty? Though opinions are divided, one thing is certain—bullfighting sparks passionate responses. Supporters argue that bullfighting is a culturally important tradition stretching back thousands of years; while animal rights groups argue that it is cruel and barbaric, causing unnecessary suffering to both bulls and horses. In Bullfighting: A Troubled History Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier brings clarity to this debate through an exploration of the long history of killing bulls as public spectacle.

This book is the first cross-cultural study of bullfighting, covering Europe, North America, and Latin America. Hardouin-Fugier shows how each continent has its own unique style and tools of the trade. For example, in North America, the favored technique is grabbing the bull by the horns, and in Europe the bull is run through with a sword. In the late 1700s bullfights became mass leisure activities, with paying spectators packing into arenas—the classic bullfight of popular imagination. It was at this time that the bullfight became a big business and the bullfighter became a celebrity. In this vivid and comprehensive history, Hardouin-Fugier also explores the extensive influence of the bullfight on art, literature, and culture from the paintings of Goya to the writings of Georges Bataille.

Enriched with many fascinating and sometimes disturbing illustrations, Bullfighting presents a discerning and intelligent approach to a divisive practice.  Hardouin-Fugier’s informative history will enthrall anyone who has been curious about bullfighting—supporters and detractors alike.

About this title

About the Author:

Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier was formerly professor of art history at the Université Jean-Moulin in Lyon. She is the author of many books including A History of Floral Painting and A History of French Still Life in the Nineteenth Century, and coauthor of Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West, also published by Reaktion books.  Sue Rose has been working as a translator from French and Italian for more than seventeen years.

Review:

"A History of Bullfighting is a compact, digestible paperback from Reaktion Books, in which the author, Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, takes the reader down the bload-soaked streets of Seville in the eighteenth century to the blood-soaked arenas of Latin American in the nineteenth to the blood-soaked manuscripts of Bataille and Hemingway in thte twentieth. . . . [The book] is spectacular in its own right--not just in its descriptions but in its images, culled from bullfighting's rich visual history." (New Yorker Book Bench blog)

 "A terrific history of, and manifesto against, bullfighting by the French art historian Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. She falls squarely in the reformist camp, and her history argues that the sport seduced artists, who glamorized and abstracted a cruel and ugly pursuit into something that bore little resemblance to bullfighting itself. . . . She stresses the brutal labor conditions of the bull farms, and vividly evokes the persistent cruelty of the life of a fighting bull, and quotes approvingly the judgment of the nineteenth-century French journalist Fleuriot de Langle, who encountered the sport on a trip south: 'Everything appalls here.' . . . Like so many other writers on this ghoulish subject, Hardouin-Fugier’s writing on bullfighting is really writing about the seduction of death. . . . that bullfighting had to offer was only a stylized form of valor and an aesthetics of destruction. In the bullring there was no transcendence of death, just death itself." (Ben Wallace-Wells New Republic)

"In this broad deconstruction of the meanings of bullfighting, Hardouin-Fugier musters copious data through wide-ranging, often novel, examples--art, literature, chronicles. This results in a powerful demythologization of the event and its meanings. Well-illustrated chapters cover history, practices, artistic interpretations, and sociocultural movements that have adopted or rejected the bullfight as a key symbol."

(Choice)

"It's safe to say Hardouin-Fugier isn't an aficionada of the bullring, yet her account of tauromachia's 'troubled' history does its best to be fair-minded. The corrida has had its controversial aspects pretty much as long as it's existed, despite the air of chivalric convention and artistic flair created around it in modern times. The cultural richness that's resulted can hardly be denied, as this stunningly (if sometimes disturbing) illustrated book makes clear."–Scotsman

(Scotsman)

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1861895186
• ISBN 13: 9781861895189
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206