Philip Armstrong’s new book Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature has just been published by Routledge. It comprises six linked studies of the ways in which British, European, and North American literatures have portrayed and been shaped by various kinds of disorienting or wondrous encounters with the nonhuman natural world: earthquakes, forests, storms, animals, and the deep ocean. The book adopts approaches from ecocriticism, new materialism, animal studies, and affect theory to discuss works by a wide range of writers including Dante, Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Voltaire, Herman Melville, JRR Tolkien, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, and Annie Proulx.
Topics discussed in the book include the following:
- Tolkien didn’t invent his famous “Ents”: he drew on ideas about scary, mobile, and clever trees from history and literature (including Shakespeare, and also the Romans, who were especially scared of trees and forests);
- Shakespeare’s works contain over 4000 references to animals: what are all those creatures doing in the Globe Theatre?
- Literature from ancient times to the present shows that humans have always been spooked by the way animals look at them – but why?
- The depths of the ocean were completely unknown, and not even thought about, until the 1850s – why? and how did that change?
- How can reading literary texts from Pliny to Annie Proulx help us address environmental crisis?
