Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature

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

Hardcover

Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature identifies and analyses literary encounters with unexpected, disconcerting, and unsettling aspects of the natural world. It includes in-depth discussion of a wide range of literary texts from the British, American, and European literary traditions, and from the Classical period to today.

New

$286.24

Or pay later with

Free 30 day returns Secure transaction

Check delivery options

Hardcover

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Description

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.

About the Author

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.