Hunting for Empire
Narratives of Sport in Rupert's Land, 1840-70
Description
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.
Reviews
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