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We explore affective registers that characterise game-angling, particularly fly-fishing, through a critical engagement with the discursive and visual strategies employed in a key game-angling periodical, Trout and Salmon magazine, across a period of sixty years. We examine how angling brands and textual utterances evoke the affective and emotional states of becoming and being an angler, and in doing so bring the sport into a state of being and becoming in which traditional and modern values work with, and in tension to, each other. We focus on three interconnected themes. First, the extent to which the practice of angling is mediated by specific brands and technologies which blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Second, the extent to which branded technologies and brand values foster angling practices that either adhere to or deviate from traditional understandings of what game-angling is and entails. Third, the ways in which dominant tropes conceptualise, frame, and canonise idealised game-angling spaces and spatial practices. We conclude with an exegesis that game-angling texts and brands tell us much about what it is to be human and animal in the choreographing and enactment of this ever-popular and ever-evolving, yet anchored, leisure world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freshwater game-angling is a growing tourism phenomenon creating modern, increasingly global, spaces of consumption where performances are acted out in varied destinations. These performances uphold sporting traditions dating from fifteenth century England, cemented in the Victorian era. This paper demonstrates how and why freshwater angling has grown to become one of the largest leisure activities. It questions whether game-angling tourism has become a profound ecotourism, drawing insights from sociology and geography to explore how game-angling tourism traverses the society/nature dualism. It finds that angling tourism is a compelling, relatively undiscovered, vehicle for understanding our passion for consuming the natural world. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Introduces an important yet original topic to tourism studies. [•] Provides an original DA of a top angling magazine, connecting theory/practice. [•] Shows tourism is increasingly central to game-angling. [•] Offers guidance on future research that will deepen understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]