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.

Philip Armstrong is a Professor of English at Te Whare Wananga 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.

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