… and to cultivate a disciplined violence useful to maintain a pugilistic spirit in times of peace. Practices > Games & Sports Mots-clés Rules Sports The popularity of boxing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is attested by the great number of … battlefield, why not a prize-fighter in the boxing ring? And indeed, Pierce Egan (1772-1849) popularized the genre of sports writing thanks to a muscular style, blending ‘inventive imagery and linguistic exuberance’. 9 Egan, in keeping …