Karen Raber

This encyclopaedic 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.

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. Karen Raber, a leading scholar in the field, clearly and cogently guides the reader through complex theoretical terrain, providing fresh, exciting readings of plays including Othello, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida and Henry IV Part 1.

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. Karen Raber, a leading scholar in the field, clearly and cogently guides the reader through complex theoretical terrain, providing fresh, exciting readings of plays including Othello, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida and Henry IV Part 1.

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. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."