Devils, Demons, Familiars, Friends: A Semiotics of Literary Cats

Devils, Demons, Familiars, Friends: A Semiotics of Literary CatsSynopsis of the Lecture

Cats have always fascinated storytellers, verse makers, painters, and great writers such as Alan Edgar Poe, Charles Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Doris Lessing, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

This lecture, which is a part of Maria’s current research on power structures in literature, will focus on some famous and less famous literary felines, considering their significance in Western literature.

Domestic cats appear in the earliest known myths and folktales as representations of the highest deities, such as the Egyptian goddess Bast, the first image of which dates back to 2,000 years BCE.

Before cats were spread in Europe, they often appeared in stories as mythical creatures, alongside dragons, unicorns and basilisks.

Later their reputation as mousers contributed to their positive reputation, which is reflected in the British folk- and chapbook tale of Dick Whittington.

During Middle Ages in Europe, cats became connected with evil powers, which was based partly on the popular beliefs about cats’ lewdness, partly on their Christian association with Satan. By the beginning of the 19th century, the cat’s repute was exculpated, and cats became popular pets in upper and middle-class families, which is reflected in numerous nursery rhymes, fables, fairy tales, children’s stories and picturebooks. Cats became benign and often sweet characters, adapted to children’s and family reading.

The most gratifying objects of study are, however, those texts in which specific feline traits are featured in combination with certain human traits, in the first hand intelligence and speech. These abilities create the hybrid human-animal character in which both aspects are amplified. Cats are often depicted as ambiguous characters, secretive, mysterious, unreliable, and yet irresistibly attractive; half animal, half divine. Their role in stories range from bold tricksters to mysterious messengers from Other worlds; from wise guides and helpers to ruthless traitors and fiends; from allegoric representations of oppressed minorities to portraits of confused teenagers. Although the subject may seem limited, it shreds some light on the (ab)use of certain images in literature and contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms of power and ideology.

Maria NikolajevaAbout Maria Nikolajeva

Maria Nikolajeva was born and grew up in Moscow, Russia. A graduate of Moscow Linguistic University, she received her PhD from Stockholm University in 1988.

She has been teaching and doing research at the Department of Comparative Literature, Stockholm University, ever since, winning, among many other academic honours, a three-year research grant from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, British Council Scholarship for British-Swedish Academic Cooperation, and Nordic Scholar Award from the University of Edinburgh.

In addition, she has spent some time abroad, as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a research fellow at the International Youth Library in Munich, a Visiting Chair at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and a guest professor at San Diego State University.

She has guest lectured all over the world and given papers at over a hundred conferences. At present, she serves on the jury of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the second largest literary award in the world after the Nobel Prize.

Maria’s main focus of research is theory of literature. Trained in the tradition of Russian semiotic school and a devoted follower of Mikhail Bakhtin, she chose literature for young people as her research material, bringing together ideas from several theoretical fields, especially narratology and feminist criticism, in her striving to develop a children’s literature-specific theory based on the unequal power position between the senders and the recipients. Apart from that, she has published on the famous Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf and many other subjects.

Her numerous book titles include Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward the New Aesthetic (1996), How Picturebooks Work, co-authored with Carole Scott (2001), From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature (2000), The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Literature (2002), and Aesthetic Approaches to Children’s Literature (2005). She sits on the editorial board of several international journals and was a senior editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature and other reference volumes. In 2005 she won the world’s most prestigious token of recognition in her field, the Brothers Grimm Award. 

Early in her career, Maria developed an interest in international scholarly collaboration, getting closely engaged in several international professional organisations, which culminated in her Presidency for the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She served two terms on the International committee of the North American Children’s Literature Association and was the coordinator of the Nordic Network for Children’s Literature Research. Her cooperation with University of Worcester began in 1999.