Riley Hull: Why does anyone care about hockey?': Disrupting the Sports Literature Genre in Fredrik Backman's Beartown
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This paper first examines sports literature as a genre, outlining its history and identifying 4 main genre conventions that have emerged from its development. Then, these 4 genre conventions are examined against Fredrik Backman's Beartown, a 2017 Swedish novel centered around ice hockey. Ultimately, this paper argues that through the disruption of typical sports literature genre conventions, Beartown theorizes sport as an emergent site of resistance to the perpetuation of gender-based off-ice violence, re-centering ice hockey and sport itself as a site of community and belonging that refuses to accept restrictive and harmful social structures of sport while still understanding the value and importance of sports to a particular community.