Abstract:
This study evolved from my research in a seminar in seventeenth-century English literature under the direction of Dr. Charles E. Walton, Chairman of the Department of English at Kansas State Teachers College. In the course of my investigations of the writings of Izaak Walton, I became interested in the long tradition of pastoral literature which dates from the time of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. I was encouraged by Dr. Walton to determine the influences of the significant pastoral writers upon the so-called pastoral conventions of English literature in order to establish the conventions that Walton may have inherited at the time of the composition of The Compleat Angler. This present thesis is the outgrowth of my subsequent investigations.
