Environment, Society, and The Compleat Angler

First published in 1653, The Compleat Angler is one of the most influential environmental texts ever written. Addressing a politically and religiously polarized nation devastated by warfare, disease, ecological degradation, and climate change, Izaak Walton’s famous fishing treatise stages a radical thought experiment: how might humanity’s enhanced relationship with the natural world generate a new kind of sustaining—and sustainable—social order beyond the traditional boundaries of the church, the state, and the biological family?

Challenging the current scholarly consensus that reads Walton’s how-to manual as a conservative polemic camouflaged by fishlore, Marjorie Swann examines this richly complicated portrayal of the natural world through an ecocritical lens and explores other neglected aspects of Walton’s writings, including his depictions of social hierarchy, gender, and sexuality. In the process, Swann analyzes a host of noncanonical environmental texts and provides a groundbreaking reappraisal of Charles Cotton’s “Part II” of The Compleat Angler. This study extends the hydrological turn in early modern ecocriticism and demonstrates how, as a genre, angling manuals provide new insights into the environmental, cultural, social, and literary history of early modern England.

Taking its place alongside landmark works of ecocriticism such as Green Shakespeare and Milton and Ecology, this fresh and timely reassessment of The Compleat Angler rightly ranks Izaak Walton among the most important environmental writers of the early modern era.

“Swann’s Environment, Society, and The Complete Angler is well-researched and packed with valuable historical context. Moreover, it corrects a very long scholarly neglect of Walton’s views of the relationship between God, nature, and humanity.”—Kenneth H Lokensgard, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

“One of the earliest and most popular precursors of nature writing in English has at last received the critical attention it deserves. Marjorie Swann's book is arguably the most complete study of The Compleat Angler ever written—and a vital corrective to outdated New Historicist interpretations. It makes an invaluable contribution to Walton studies and early modern ecocriticism.”—Todd Andrew Borlik, author of Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures

Marjorie Swann is Professor of English at Ottawa University. She is the author of Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England and editor of a new critical edition of The Compleat Angler (Oxford University Press, 2014).

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Note on the Text

Introduction

1. The Environmental Imagination of Izaak Walton

2. Creating the Brotherhood of the Angle

3. The Great Chain of Eating

4. Charles Cotton and the Properties of Angling

Epilogue: Haunted by Walton

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

Literary Studies

           English

Nature

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Early Modern