Shakespeare and Animals: A Dictionary
By Karen Raber and Karen Edwards (Bloomsbury 2022)
This encyclopedic account of animals in Shakespeare's plays and poems, provides readers with a much-needed resource by which to navigate the recent outpouring of critical and historical work on the topic. This dictionary extends its coverage to include insects, fish and mythic creatures, as well as the places, practices and lore pertaining to all animal-oriented experiences of early modern life. It emphasizes the role of animality in defining character, and is attentive to the instabilities of the human-animal boundary as they were theatrically represented, exploited and interrogated, but it is also concerned with the material presence of animals on stage and in everyday life in Shakespeare's world. The volume is a new tool for instructors, but is also a resource for critics and scholars in the many disciplines engaged with animal studies, posthumanist theory, ecostudies and cultural studies.
The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals
Edited by Karen Raber and Holly Dugan (Routledge 2020)
Shakespeare’s plays have a long and varied performance history. The relevance of his plays in literary studies cannot be understated, but only recently have scholars been looking into the presence and significance of animals within the canon. Readers will quickly find—without having to do extensive research—that the plays are teeming with animals! In this Handbook, Karen Raber and Holly Dugan delve deep into Shakespeare’s World to illuminate and understand the use of animals in his span of work. This volume supplies a valuable resource, offering a broad and thorough grounding in the many ways animal references and the appearance of actual animals in the plays can be interpreted. It provides a thorough overview; demonstrates rigorous, original research; and charts new frontiers in the field through a broad variety of contributions from an international group of well-known and respected scholars.
Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory
By Karen Raber (Bloomsbury 2018)
Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory charts challenges in the field of Shakespeare studies to the assumption that the category “human” is real, stable, or worthy of privileging in discussions of the playwright's work. Drawing on a variety of methodologies - cognitive theory, systems theory, animal studies, ecostudies, the new materialisms - the volume investigates the world of Shakespeare's plays and poems in order to represent more thoroughly its variety, its ethics of inclusion, and its resistance to human triumphalism and exceptionalism.
Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater
Edited by Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld (Penn State University Press 2017)
From bears on the Renaissance stage to the equine pageantry of the nineteenth-century hunt, animals have been used in human-orchestrated entertainments throughout history. The essays in this volume present an array of case studies that inspire new ways of interpreting animal performance and the role of animal agency in the performing relationship.
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture
By Karen Raber (UPenn Press 2013)
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture examines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives.
The Cultural History of Women: Vol. 3, The Renaissance
Edited by Karen Raber (Bloomsbury 2013)
A Cultural History of Women is a six-volume series reviewing the changing cultural construction of women and women’s historical experiences throughout history. Each volume follows the same basic structure and begins with an outline account of the major ideas about women in the historical period under consideration. Next, specialists examine aspects of women’s history under eight key headings: the life cycle, bodies/sexuality, religion/popular beliefs, medicine/disease, public/private, education/work, power, and artistic representation. Thus, readers can choose a synchronic or a diachronic approach to the material—a single volume can be read to obtain a thorough knowledge of women’s history in a given period, or one of the eight themes can be followed through time by reading the relevant chapters of all six volumes, thus providing a thematic understanding of changes and developments over the long term.
Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare
Edited by Thomas Hallock, Ivo Camps, and Karen Raber (Palgrave 2009)
The essays in this volume interrogate the unique and often problematic relationship between early modern cultural studies and ecocriticism, providing theoretical insights and models for a future practice that successfully wed the two disciplines.
Elizabeth Cary, Vol 6
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
Edited by Karen Raber (Ashgate 2009)
Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, the first original drama written in English by a woman, has been a touchstone for feminist scholarship in the period for several decades and is now one of the most anthologized works by a Renaissance woman writer. Her History of Edward II has provided fertile ground for questions about authorship and historical form. The essays included in this volume highlight the many evolving debates about Cary's works, from their complicated generic characteristics, to the social and political contexts they reflect, to the ways in which Cary's writing enters into dialogue with texts by male writers of her time. In its critical introduction, the volume offers a thorough analysis of where Cary criticism has been and where it might venture in the future.
The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World
Edited by Karen Raber and Treva J. Tucker (Palgrave 2005)
This volume fills an important gap in the analysis of early modern history and culture by reintroducing scholars to the significance of the horse. A more complete understanding of the role of horses and horsemanship is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the early modern world. Each essay in the collection provides a snapshot of how horse culture and the broader culture—that tapestry of images, objects, structures, sounds, gestures, texts, and ideas—articulate. Without knowledge of how the horse figured in all these aspects, no version of political, material, or intellectual culture in the period can be entirely accurate.
Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama
By Karen Raber (Delaware 2001)
Dramatic Difference argues that early modern women writers manipulated the class-based exclusivity of closet drama to justify their own contributions to this highly political genre. The book situates women writers’ work in the context of their male peers’ use of the genre and looks at how the genre’s social and political orientation changed from the late sixteenth century through the Restoration.