Echoing Greens: Cricket and the English Imagination: Cricket and the English Imagination

The importance of cricket to the English imagination has been immortalised in the art and literature of a thousand years. It is a story that is known in part, but one that has never been explored in full. And it is lined with surprises, forgotten tales, unnoticed details - ranging from medieval manuscript illustrations, through a dazzling variety of visual art, poetry, fiction, and drama, to recent portraits of contemporary heroes.

Echoing Greens will explore the depth of the bond between cricket and the English imagination. For countless artists and writers across the centuries, the culture and aesthetics of cricket - white-clad players, the crack of bat on ball, booming appeals, admiring applause, figures running up to bowl, batsmen leaning, waiting, swinging the blade - have been as essential to the English landscape as the hills and meadows immortalised by Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. And in pursuing this journey, Echoing Greens will show that - beneath cosy patriotic dreams of ’English values’ - a much wilder, more complex story exists. Alongside stories of heroic figures, noble values, and pastoral idylls, the literature and the art of cricket also tell of vice, violence, and scandal. In unveiling the true story behind these representations of the game, this book will also force us to reconsider the history of cricket itself.

Born in London’s East End, Brendan Cooper received his BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on British and American literature, including a critical guide to William Blake and a study of Cold War American poetry. He is the author of Deep Pockets.