Bullfighting

Description

'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 honour...'-Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1926). Hemingway's marvelling take on Spanish-style bullfightingùfor him a spectacular performance art fraught with risk ù is but one among many preposterous evasions of the gross reality that animates one of today's most contested public spectacles. In Bullfighting, A troubled history, the first-ever cross-cultural study of the subject, Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier examines at length and in depth the corruptions, cruelties and delusions that over the centuries have in turn made and sustained the world of celebrity cape-and-sword 'artists' decked out in fantastically gaudy suits. Some former bullfighting countries have moved On, while other states (such as Portugal) prefer to place limits on the cruelties permitted in the ring; and there are towns and cities in South America, France and Spain that have imposed municipal bans. What support that remains for bullfighting is diminishing and fatally compromised. But the fight against bullfighting today is far from over, as this important contribution to the debate makes only too clear. --Book Jacket.

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