Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature

Philip Armstrong

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English

Routledge
06 November 2024

Literary studies: general; Zoology & animal sciences; The environment

Series: Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture

Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature identifies and analyses encounters with unexpected, disconcerting, and unsettling aspects of the natural world, as these have been represented across a wide range of literary texts. It includes in‑depth discussion of both familiar and less familiar works from the British, American, and European literary traditions, and from the Classical period to today. The motifs discussed include earthquakes, forests, storms, animals, and oceanic depth, and the writers include Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Voltaire, Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, H.G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Proulx. Rich in both close textual analysis and contextual discussion, Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature offers a vivid introduction to several topical approaches to literary‑critical analysis, including ecocriticism, new materialism, affect theory, and human‑animal studies, thereby demonstrating how literature shapes and is shaped by our response to the pressing questions of our time.

By: Philip Armstrong
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 630g
ISBN: 9781032733159
ISBN 10: 1032733152
Series: Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
Pages: 244
Publication Date: 06 November 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction: Moving Nature PART ONE: NATURE’S AGENCIES 1. The Literary Seismograph: Earthquakes in European Literature and Thought 2. Fear of the Forest: Cultural Xylophobia from Pliny to Proulx 3. Shakespeare’s Vital Parts: Animal, Vegetable, and Meteorological Actors on the Shakespearean Stage PART TWO: ANIMAL AFFECTS 4. Baleful Light: Literary Encounters with the Gaze of Animals 5. Taxonomy and Wonder: Old World Bestiaries and New World Marvels 6. The Lower Deep: Fathoming the Abyss in Moby-Dick Epilogue Index

Philip Armstrong is a Professor of English at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Visual Regime (2000), Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2001), What Animals Mean in the Literature of Modernity (Routledge 2008), A New Zealand Book of Beasts (co‑written with Annie Potts and Deidre Brown, 2013), Sheep (2016), and two books of poetry.