Vigyor macska nélkül. Lewis Carroll, Alice Csodaországban és az animalisztikus nonszensz
Grin without a Cat: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and the Animalistic Nonsense

Summary/Abstract: The Cheshire Cat who unexpectedly vanishes to leave only its grin behind is one of the most iconic characters of Lewis Carroll's Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasy duology Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. My essay argues that this feline bordercrosser figure embodies the subversive features of the literary nonsense genre distinguished by a strategic destabilisation of hierarchically organised power positionalities (sense/nonsense, adult/child, man/animal). The cat as a metamorphic trickster mockingly unsettles the naturalised preeminence of the anthropocentric perspective, and mankind's supremacy in the Great Chain of Being, while it also challenges the notion of the speaking subject through conveying language philosophical commentaries about the unmasterability of meanings. It reveals the anxieties and desires permeating 19th century human-animal relations and offers commentary on the epistemological crisis induced by the darwinian evolutionary theory, with the aim to promote an ethics grounded in the recognition of interspecies connectedness. Through its special dis/locations in the book-object the cat playing hide-and-seek in the Carrollian imagetext also acts as an agent inducing ludic iconotextual interactions

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