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 gro