Cats in Literature, British Library Course; Dr. Catherine Parry; January - February 2019

Course Outline

British Library:

Thursdays 10, 17, 24, 31 January and 7, 14 February 2019
Times 18.00-20.00
Location Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre

Course description "There are many cats prowling through the fiction, myths and fables, poetry and philosophical essays of Western literature. They might talk or wear human clothes, keep company with witches, symbolise human characteristics, or slip, sleek and graceful, through human life in their own independent way. This course explores cats in Western literature and considers how humans imagine them and write about them. For humans, cats often seem to be duplicitous creatures; they are by turns aloof and affectionate, killer and pet, wilfully independent and self-indulgently home-loving, vicious and docile. Such contrariness has inspired many different ideas about cats, and across history they have been perceived as cherished pets, associates of the devil, symbols of female sensuality and sexual depravity, and anthropomorphic moralisers, and they are, accordingly, both loved and reviled in Western culture. This course traces such imaginings of cats in literature, asking what makes cats so fascinating, appealing and unsettling. H. P. Lovecraft celebrated the “free soul” of cats, and Chateaubriand their “almost ungrateful character”; join us to discover these and many other ways that humans imagine cats in writing".

"This course is led by Dr Catherine Parry. Catherine lectures at the University of Lincoln and writes on animals in literature. She has authored Other Animals in Twenty-first Century Fiction (2017) and further work on science fiction, rurality in British fiction, and the environment and farming in British shepherd’s calendar life-writing. At present, she is researching relationships between humans and captive chimpanzees in life-writing and popular science-writing".

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Dr. Parry tells me that the course members will also be reading "The Cat of Portovecchio, Corfu Tales" by Maria Strani-Potts as part of Week 3, "Cats and women":

"There is a longstanding association between the feline and the feminine. Bastet was, among various duties, goddess of maternity and the home, while in Mediaeval Europe cats – along with toads, hares and other animals – were witches’ familiars. By the 19th century, cats were functioning as figurations of female beauty, danger, wilfulness and perversity, sexuality and promiscuity. This week we will consider relationships between representations of cats and women in Baudelaire’s ‘The Cat’, a Victorian morality tale called ‘Pussy’s road to ruin’, and Don Marquis’ verse narrative Archy and Mehitabel".