Introduction: On Fishing

Summary

The minds of fish, the dreams and disposition of the angler, and the captivating paradoxes of the fisherman’s art: Virginia Woolf’s essay on fishing addresses the relationship between literature and the natural world, and the status of fishing as a moral, technical, and psychological exercise. In her essay Woolf reviews J. W. Hills’ classic fly-fishing guide, A Summer on the Test (1924), dwelling on the power of the text to transport the reader into the environment it evokes.¹ Transpose these concerns to the open sea, and her words could delineate the world of Oppian’s Halieutica, a second-century ce Greek didactic epic in which fish and men, as well as poetry, politics, and pragmatism, collide before the reader’s eyes. In five hexameter books on fish and fishing, the Halieutica too sets out to ‘penetrate’ a shadowy aquatic domain, portraying the hopes, struggles, and character traits of both humans and the fish they pursue.