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Curiosities and Texts The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern
England Marjorie Swann "Highly recommended."--"Library Journal" A
craze for collecting swept England during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats and middling-sort men alike
crammed their homes full of a bewildering variety of physical
objects: antique coins, scientific instruments, minerals, mummified
corpses, zoological specimens, plants, ethnographic objects from
Asia and the Americas, statues, portraits. Why were these bizarre
jumbles of artifacts so popular? In "Curiosities and Texts,"
Marjorie Swann demonstrates that collections of physical objects
were central to early modern English literature and culture. Swann
examines the famous collection of rarities assembled by the
Tradescant family; the development of English natural history;
narrative catalogs of English landscape features that began to
appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods; the writings of Ben Jonson
and Robert Herrick; and the foundation of the British Museum.
Through this wide-ranging series of case studies, Swann addresses
two important questions: How was the collection, which was
understood as a form of cultural capital, appropriated in early
modern England to construct new social selves and modes of
subjectivity? And how did literary texts--both as material objects
and as vehicles of representation--participate in the process of
negotiating the cultural significance of collectors and collecting?
Crafting her unique argument with a balance of detail and insight,
Swann sheds new light on material culture's relationship to
literature, social authority, and personal identity. Marjorie Swann
teaches English at the University of Kansas. Material Texts 2001
288 pages 6 x 9 10 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3610-1 Cloth $59.95s
39.00 World Rights History, Literature
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The Compleat Angler (Paperback)
Izaak Walton, Charles Cotton; Edited by Marjorie Swann
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R283
R231
Discovery Miles 2 310
Save R52 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'I envy no body but him, and him only, that catches more fish than
I do.' A unique celebration of the English countryside and the most
famous book on angling ever published, Walton's Compleat Angler
first appeared in 1653. In 1676, at Walton's invitation, his friend
Charles Cotton contributed his pioneering exploration of
fly-fishing. The book is both a manual of instruction and a vision
of society in harmony with nature. It guides the novice fisherman
on how to catch and cook a variety of fish, on how to select and
prepare the best bait and make artificial flies, and on the habits
of freshwater fish. It also promotes angling as a communal activity
in which the bonds of friendship are forged through shared
experience of the natural world. Anecdotes, poetry, music, and song
intersperse the rural descriptions, which promote conservation as
well as sport. This new edition highlights the book's continuing
relevance to our relationship with the environment, and explores
the turbulent history from which it came. ABOUT THE SERIES: For
over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the
widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable
volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the
most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features,
including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful
notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further
study, and much more.
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.
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