"Modern prizefighting is a remarkable metaphor for the philosophical and social condition of men (and sometimes, women)in modern mass society. Launched in eighteenth-century England, largely as a way of upper-class betting men to amuse themselves at the expense of lower-class ruffians, prize-fighting was created in anticipation of mass industrialized society, where it has flourished as a sport and, even more startlingly, as an aesthetic: namely, to watch without seeing. The prizefighter enacts a drama of poor taste (but not of absurdity, as the modern professional wrestler does) that is in truth nothing more than an expression of resentment or a pantomime of rebellion totally devoid of any political context except ritualized male anger turned into a voyeuristic fetish" (xiv)

Early, Gerald. The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture.