Professor Karen Edwards

Office: Room 203, QB Tel. ext. 4271 email: k.l.edwards@exeter.ac.uk

My research and teaching focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, especially the works of John Milton, in the context of natural history, the Bible and religion, and politics. Milton and the Natural World (1999) places Milton's representation of the plants and animals of Eden in the wider context of the scientific revolution and of Europe's exploration of 'new worlds'. Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary (2005-2009) studies the presence of animals in literature of the period, in terms both of their scientific representation and of their symbolic and polemical functions. The monograph I am now writing, Political Animals in Early Modern England, extends my study of the distinctive early modern fusion of physical and symbolic worlds into a study of vituperative animal epithets – ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’, ‘greedy cormorants’, ‘vipers of sedition’ – in polemical exchanges from the Reformation to the Restoration. I aim to demonstrate that changes in the use of animal images and metaphors among religious and political controversialists enable us to understand how ‘hate language’ contributed to the outbreak of civil war and the gradual erosion of the Bible as the basis for public discourse. I co-edited with Prof. Jane Spencer and Dr. Derek Ryan a collection of essays entitled Reading Literary Animals, Medieval to Modern (Routledge, 2020), and I am currently co-authoring an Arden dictionary of Shakespeare’s animals (forthcoming, 2022).

I came to Exeter University in 1992 from the US, where I was born and educated (PhD, Yale University; BA, Brown University). I had been teaching at Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) before moving to the UK.

I am happy to supervise students who wish to work on the literature of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, especially the poetry and prose of John Milton; on early modern 'science' and natural history, especially the representation of animals; on the Bible and/as literature, especially in relationship to the early modern period; and on the political culture of the seventeenth century, especially in relation to polemical language.