This section contains 9,596 words (approx. 32 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Gutierrez, Nancy C. “Beware the Cat: Mimesis in a Skin of Oratory.” Style 23, no. 1 (spring 1989): 49-69.
In the following excerpt, Gutierrez asserts that Beware the Cat articulates the humanist theory that a text is not just a product of its author but an experience of reading that serves to create a more moral reader.
In a ballad entitled “A shorte Answere to the boke called: Beware the Cat” (pub c. 1570), the anonymous poet derides William Baldwin's piece of short fiction, published in 1570, as a misrepresentation of the truth: “Every thing almost: in that boke is as tru / As that at midsomer” (Holden 94). The poet's confident and condescending exposé of Baldwin's apparent chicanery loses its bite, however, when one realizes that Beware the Cat is a rhetorical tour de force which depends on the reader's ability to grasp not only the fictive nature of the contents, but also...
This section contains 9,596 words (approx. 32 pages at 300 words per page) |