SOURCE: Radcliffe, David Hill. “‘Study to Be Quiet’: Genre and Politics in Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler,” in English Literary Renaissance, 22, No. 1 (Winter, 1992): 95-111.

In the essay below, Radcliffe examines the issues of discourse, inclusion, and community in The Compleat Angler.

Izaak Walton's famous discourse on angling and devotion exhibits the values of inclusiveness and heterogeneity rather than exclusion and methodical rigor. These are not values generally associated with discursive formations, nor is the “brotherhood of anglers” typical of what recent criticism regards as a discursive community. Walton's discourse can thus serve as a counter-example to accounts of literary and social formations which identify discursive formations with hegemonic structures. While any text can represent current thought about “discourse” only to a limited extent, Stanley Fish's recent discussion, “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do,” seems exceptional primarily in the rigor with which he pursues the logic of incommensurability...