Fashioning a Freshwater Eden: Elite Anglers, Fish Culture, and State Development of Québec's 'Sport' Fishery

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Fashioning a Freshwater Eden: Elite Anglers, Fish Culture, and State Development of Québec's 'Sport' Fishery
Abstract
Quebec possesses such a vast assemblage of freshwater rivers, lakes, and streams filled with so many iconic game fish that many nineteenth-century British and American anglers came to view it as a pristine and even 'Edenic' aquatic landscape. The author points out that although initially a small foreign cohort, these elite anglers who came to Quebec represented a significant new cultural force. This angling elite shared an intellectual conception of nature, which caused them to infuse the landscape with new values even as they sought to control it for their own purposes. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the author maintains, government policies increasingly brought these anglers' ideas and activities under State regulation through laws, licenses and leases, the use of fish culture, and well-targeted promotional schemes. Ultimately, the author concludes, these anglers' efforts to create an exclusive paradise for their activities merged with this auxiliary intervention by the State to produce a cultural and environmental legacy that included the subordination of people, the diminution of the social importance of non-game species, and the creation of novel aquatic ecosystems through the introduction of foreign species.
Type
PhD dissertation
University
Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
Place
Trois-Rivières, QC
Date
2008
# of Pages
xxvi-320p.
Language
en
URL
Citation
Kinsey, Darin. “Fashioning a Freshwater Eden: Elite Anglers, Fish Culture, and State Development of Québec’s ‘Sport’ Fishery.” PhD dissertation, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2008. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol2/002/NR44175.PDF.
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