Haunted By Waters: Fly Fishing In North American Literature - Hardcover

Browning, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821412183 ISBN 13: 9780821412183

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Four essential questions: Why does one fish? How should one properly fish? What relations are created in fishing? And what effects does fishing have on the future? Haunted by Waters is a self-examination by the author as he constructs his own narrative and tries to answer these questions for himself. But it is also a thorough examination of the answers he uncovers in the course of reading what's been written on the subject.

As his own story unfolds, Mark Browning analyzes angling literature from the Bible to Norman Maclean, always bringing his inquiry back to the same source: the enigma of this sport.

Haunted by Waters is an exploration of the apparent compulsion of those who fish not only to read about the sport, but to write about it as well. Mark Browning's personal account as a fly fisherman and his perspective as a critic make him uniquely qualified to navigate these waters.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Browning is a teacher and writer at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas.

From Kirkus Reviews:

paper 0-8214-1219-1 Fishing, particularly fly fishing, writes Browning, ``seems to hold a disproportionate place'' in North American letters In this thoughtful, penetrating, but dissertation-like look at the literature of fly-fishing, the author notes that fishermen who write can be likened to our ancient ancestors, ``who blazoned portrayals of the hunt on the walls of . . . caves.'' Browning asserts that ``the distinctiveness'' of American fishing writing flows from the Transcendentalists, in particular from a few paragraphs by Thoreau in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers wherein he views an old man fishing from a riverbank as performing ``a sort of solemn sacrament.'' Thoreau and others established another early hallmark of American fishing writing, he suggests, by wistfully writing of a Golden Age in America ``to be preferred over the present age of industry.'' But it is in scrutinizing Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and his story ``Big Two-Hearted River'' that Browning finds the most profound portrayals of fishing as an ``activity where life and death meet and stare at each other.'' Unfortunately, this is also where the author's dissertation style is most in evidence as he overreaches to investigate the ``story's doubleness,'' as suggested by its title. Interspersed with these scholarly chapters are interludes about Brownings own fishing experiences. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0821412183
• ISBN 13: 9780821412183
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228