What if Christopher Smart’s Cat Responded?

A Human-Animal Studies Perspective on Jubilate Agno’s Cat Jeoffrey

Author(s)

  • Magdalena Ożarska Jan Kochanowski University Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9652

Abstract

The paper revisits Christopher Smart's Cat Jeoffry section of Jubilate Agno (1759-1763) using a Human and Animal Studies research perspective. The issues discussed include the concept of pethood as embraced by the poet, with special focus on the cat's name and its significance. Traces of the animal's Derridean “gazing” at and responding to the human are sought, as is evidence of Dominique Lestel's “thinking hairy” on the part of Smart the poet.

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Author Biography

  • Magdalena Ożarska, Jan Kochanowski University

    Magdalena Ożarska, Ph.D. habil., is Associate Professor at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland. She is the author of Meanderings of the English Enlightenment: The Literary Oeuvre of Christopher Smart (2008), Lacework or Mirror? Diary Poetics of Frances Burney, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (2013) and Two Women Writers and their Italian Tours: Mary Shelley’s “Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843” and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa’s “In and Beyond the Alps” (2014). Her research interests include 18th- and 19th-century English and Polish women’s self-writing, animal studies, critical plant studies, food studies, geopoetics, and digital humanities.

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Published

2016-09-22

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2016)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Ożarska, Magdalena. 2016. “What If Christopher Smart’s Cat Responded? A Human-Animal Studies Perspective on Jubilate Agno’s Cat Jeoffrey”. Humanimalia 8 (1): 35-52. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9652.