The Hunter Elite

In this book, Tara Kathleen Kelly does a remarkable job in blending the histories of Progressive Era hunting, gender, publishing, and the environment. She successfully defends her thesis that a group of white, elite men with privileged access to publishing and especially to the periodical market established a popular and influential hunting narrative that not only transformed recreational hunting into useful manly labor but also drove American middle-class attitudes toward conservation. The Hunter Elite is divided into three parts, with several chapters each. The first one focuses on the transformation of hunting narratives after the publication of Theodore S. Van Dyke's The Still-Hunter (1882). Kelly studies a large number of books and magazine articles that changed the popular understanding of big-game hunting. Hunter-authors such as the Outing magazine editor Caspar Whitney made use of the expanding publishing market and constructed a “useful, exemplary, and educational” narrative that “allowed men to express their appreciation of nature in print without risking being considered unmanly, effeminate, or unproductive” (p. 89). Without denying Theodore Roosevelt's immense influence, Kelly here complicates his prominent role in the Progressive Era hunting narrative, demonstrating that his active connection between big-game hunting and an aggressive masculinity leaning toward violent behavior was an important but still unusual element in that discourse. Instead, most authors stressed the relevance of hunting as an exercise in manly self-control

Art · Elite · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Publishing · Recreation · Sociology · White (mutation · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · American Sports and Literature · Gender Studies · History · Law

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