| Recent interest in early-modern English angling literature has pointed toward continued inquiry into how the central works in the tradition represent eroticism, sexual difference, and male friendship in their constructions of the angler as subject. This dissertation furthers the study of those aspects of the early discourse of angling by applying analytical tools derived from queer critical, theoretical and historiographical studies, feminist approaches to literary representation, and materialist interrogations of textuality in a reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works on fishing, especially the treatyse of fysshyng wyth an Angle (1496) and The Compleat Angler (1653-1676). Additionally, this project examines a selection of noteworthy late-modern American works by Norman Maclean, David James Duncan, Pam Houston, Gretchen Legler, and Annie Proulx that revisit the same issues while negotiating how to appropriate the earlier authorial figures, the texts associated with their names, and the discursive formations established by them. Thus, Haunted by Authors initiates a genealogical critique that illustrates how the presumptive homonormativity of Anglo-American angling emerges from a repressive and sexually segregated cultural context that champions male friendship while marginalizing female participation.;"Identification, Desire and the Gender Differential in Early-Modern English and Late-Modern American Angling" examines how the early texts configure the angler as a genteel subject who is marked by triangulated desires for gentility and for fish. Additionally, it shows how in the early works the celebration of male friendship and the marginalization of female participation in angling work in tandem and that these concerns reappear in writings by Houston, Duncan, and Legler. "'On the margins of gentility': Walton, Pastoral, and the Pleasures of Affiliation" uses the work of Shoshana Felman and others to trace how Izaak Walton conflates the literary and Christian pastoral modes in creating an instructional dialogue that is at once seductive and salvific. "For thou thy self art thine own bait": lyric subjectivity and auto/eroticism in Walton's Compleat Angler (1653) considers how recent discussions of lyric subjectivity, particularly Carla Freccero's queer reading of Petrarchan verse, suggest that the homoerotic staging of Donne's poem in The Compleat Angler is balanced by a solipsism that renders its performance an auto/erotic event. "'By thee fish die; by thee dead friends revive"': Collaboration, Amity, and Timelessness in Walton, Cotton, and Maclean" argues that Walton's collaborative relationships with Henry Wotton and Charles Cotton typify what Jody Greene has called "the work of friendship" and graphically illustrate Jeffrey Masten's delineation of the homoerotics of "textual intercourse." The conclusion summarizes the findings of each chapter before turning to a brief reading of Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" and Ang Lee's film of the same name that demonstrates correspondences between past and present in the discourse on angling. |
