ABSTRACT
Izaak Walton’s monumental treatise The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, served as both a retrospective of received piscatory knowledge and a sudden promotion of the sport in the cultural imagination of early modern England. As the Angler shifts its function from cookbook to field guide to dramatic dialogue, it repeatedly reinterprets the reader’s role. The Angler becomes a performance text, one that can apparently draw people around itself in order to bring about a specific social experience and an aesthetic product. The Angler is conversional in both its content and its function; it relates a story of one man’s fundamental change from hunter to angler, and it attempts to carry readers through a similar process by bringing them along for the fishing trip that serves as the instructional frame. The Angler opens, as so many early modern texts do, with a group of men gathered in a scene of mutual admiration.
