Hunting for Empire: Narratives of Sport in Rupert's Land, 1840-70 (Nature | History | Society) - Softcover

Gillespie, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0774813555 ISBN 13: 9780774813556

Publisher: UBC Press, 2008

Synopsis

Despite Canada’s vast wilderness and outdoor heritage, the history of sport hunting remains at the periphery of academic thought. Hunting for Empire writes sport hunting into Canadian scholarship and provides a starting point for further study.

Hunting for Empire offers a cultural history of sport and imperialism as revealed through 19th-century British big-game hunting and exploration narratives from the western interior of Rupert’s Land. Greg Gillespie integrates critical perspectives from cultural history, cultural studies, literary criticism, and cultural geography to analyze the themes of authorship, sport, science, and nature. Blending these interdisciplinary perspectives, he produces a unique theoretical lens to study narratives of early imperial sport hunting that prevailed before the rise of western Canada’s hunting tourism industry in the late 19th century.

Sharply written and evocatively illustrated, Hunting for Empire will appeal to students and scholars of culture, sport, geography, and history, and to general readers interested in stories of hunting, empire, and the Canadian wilderness.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Gillespie is an assistant professor in the Department of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University.

Review

This short work has much to commend it. For a start, it has an extremely clever title. [...] Second, it is relatively concise, fluently written, and interestingly illustrated. And third, it has a thorough and valuable foreword (more substantial than many of the genre) by Graeme Wynn, the general editor of the Nature/ History/ Society series in which it appears ... This book would be of interest to all who work, on an international basis, on the relationship of Europeans to land, peoples, wildlife, and landscape. Where-as North American history is too often treated in isolation, here we have a serious attempt to set it into wider global phenomena. (John M. MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh International History Review, 30, 4 2008-12-01)

Hunting for Empire offers a fresh cultural history of sport and imperialism. Greg Gillespie integrates critical perspectives from cultural studies, literary criticism, and cultural geography to analyze the themes of authorship, sport, science, and nature. In doing so he produces a unique theoretical lens through which to study nineteenth-century British big-game hunting and exploration narratives from the western interior of Rupert’s Land.

Sharply written and evocatively illustrated, Hunting for Empire will appeal to students and scholars of culture, sport, geography, and history, and to general readers interested in stories of hunting, empire, and the Canadian wilderness.

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0774813555
• ISBN 13: 9780774813556
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200