This is the first monograph to examine the role of modern sports in Expressionist literature. Adopting a cultural-historical approach, the study analyses sport themes in Expressionism alongside socio-cultural contexts and meanings. Expressionist texts on sport thus become integral elements of the corporal and the symbolic cultures of modernity that frequently tease out tensions between individual, vitalising liberation and collective, devitalising disciplining of the sporting body. In using boxing, tennis, cycling and football, the study takes as its main examples four sports that arrived in Germany from the late 19th century to quickly become popular mass sports and commercial spectator sports.