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The Cat and the Human Imagination is a fascinating historical survey of the changing cultural attitudes towards cats and the myriad ways that they have been depicted in literature and art. Feline images have permeated civilization since the time of the ancient Egyptians, and during this time the status of the cat has changed dramatically. The book examines the changing images-- fertility goddess, sly little predator, agent of Satan, avenging witness, aristocrat, friend, spirit of the home, bloodthirsty killer, seductive female--and relates them to the contexts in which they arose. It also analyzes how human attitudes towards cats seem to have evolved in parallel with attitudes towards animals, towards authority, and towards gender.

Western literature and visual art have reflected this change, developing from bare sketches to richly varied expressions of feline personality and human interaction with cats. Katharine M. Rogers seeks out the cats who make appearances in an impressive range of literary and artistic works, providing the first critical look at the symbolic functioning of cat characters in Poe's "The Black Cat," Dickens's Bleak House, and Zola's Therese Raquin, among other literary works. The historical and artistic range covered is impressive, creating a rich compendium that is the ideal book for the cat lover seeking a refreshingly substantial and scholarly work about this fascinating animal.

"This book is a classic-- something every cat-loving intellectual will have to own. (No one, of course, ever really owns a cat--but everyone should own this book.) It's the kind of book you want to quote from at the vet's, or cocktail parties, or whenever you get the urge to convert a dog lover to the true faith." --Emily Toth, Louisiana State University

Katharine M. Rogers is Professor Emerita of English, City University of New York. Her previous books include Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England and Frances Burney: The World of "Female Difficulties."


Customer Review: Cat and the Human Imagination
"God made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger." So said Fernand Mery, and so it is. The cat has shared our home since the age of the pharaohs. In that span of time she has been the subject of artists and poets, cartoonists and fabulists. By turns she has been depicted as either self-absorbed or self-possessed, maliciously rebellious or innocently mischievous, incorrigibly wild or something like Mery's tiger. In The Cat and the Human Imagination Katharine Brown offers a fascinating overview of our changing perception of the cat. Brown analyzes the works of artists from Lorenzo Lotto, whose 16th The Annunciation includes a sinister, almost rat-like cat which seems intent on fleeing the holy scene to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose paintings of young women with cats were studies in languid sensuality. It's a pity there are so few paintings included in this book. The writers who have felt motivated to write about the cat are too numerous to mention. Baudelaire evoked the cat's "physical beauty and grace" in his mid-19th century poem "The Cat" and shocked bourgeois society with his decadent tastes. The Bronte sisters made cats the mainstay in the well-ordered household and so pleased Victorian society. Poe stressed their mystery.... My favorite is Rudyard Kipling's "The Cat That Walked by Himself," the best of his Just So Stories. As Brown writes: "We not only tolerate the cat's resistance to human authority and take vicarious pleasure in its freedom from the conventions that inhibit us-we idealize its independence. Rudyard Kipling wrote the classic tribute to the cat's quiet insistence on keeping true to himself in the brilliant fable "The Cat That Walked by Himself." After Woman has domesticated Man, Dog, and Horse, Cat smells warm milk and presents himself at the cave. He persuades her to admit him by amusing the baby, putting it to sleep by purring, and killing a mouse in the cave - all of which he would have done anyway to please himself. Thus he wins his point without making any concessions: "still I am the Cat who walks by himself." After reading The Cat and the Human Imagination it occurs to me that we need something akin to a quantum theory to account for our various perceptions of the cat. Is it a merciless predator or an epitome of solicitous motherhood? Is it the companion of haggard old crones or sensuous young women? Is it affectionate or aloof? Physicist asked whether light was a wave or a particle and decided that the answer depended on who asked the question. Maybe it's so with the cat as well.
Customer Review: Broad ranging,entertaining,work by a scholarly cat admirer
The comprehensive scope and depth of Rogers' work reflects her long standing personal regard for and civilized society's varied view of the domestic cat over the centuries. Rogers' earlier studies of women in literature are woven into this work in insightful but possibly controversial ways which challenge and interest the reader. There are dozens of references to art and literature that provoke one's interest in learning more, and do not bore the reader. This is a work for adults, a gem that anyone at all interested in the societal history of the domestic cat will admire and return to.


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