Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz


Book Description

Called the "Quintessence of the Baroque" and "Bridge to the Enlightenment," Mexican writer and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has also been celebrated as the "First Feminist of the New World." Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz fills a gap Called the "Quintessence of the Baroque" and "Bridge to the Enlightenment," Mexican writer and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has also been celebrated as the "First Feminist of the New World." Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz fills a gap in the scholarship on Sor Juana by exploring the implications of her feminist staus in literary and cultural terms. Editor Stephanie Merrim's introduction surveys key issues in Sor Juana criticism from a feminist literary perspective and suggests a blueprint for future studies. Essays by Dorothy Schons and Asunción Lavrin reconstitute essential dimensions or Sor Juana's world, addressing biographical questions about the norms and values of religious life. Moving from social norms to their verbal expression, Josefina Ludmer reads Sor Juana's Respuesta for its stratagems of resistance, and Stehanie Merrim uncovers in Sor Juana's theater the encoded drama of the conflicted creative woman.




Women in Hispanic Literature


Book Description

The topics covered by this pioneering collection of essays range from peninsular Spanish to Latin American literature, from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, and from the subject of women as portrayed in Hispanic literature to the literature of Hispanic women writers. Some pieces present polemical feminist arguments, other are more traditional. All the contributors use their subject to take new stands on old controversies, ask new questions, and reevaluate important aspects of Hispanic literature. While there is ample evidence in these essays of the dual archetype in Hispanic literature of women as icon and woman as fallen idol, the collection reaches beyond these stereotypes to more complex sociological and theoretical concerns. Although such research has ben abundantly pursued by scholars of English and American literature, it has been notably absent from Hispanic studies. This anthology is a comprehensive introduction to its subject and a stimulus to further work in the area. Contributors: Fernando Alegría Electa Arenal Julianne Burton Alan Deyermond Rosalie Gimeno Harriet Goldberg Estelle Irizarry Kathleen Kish Luis Leal Linda Gould Levine Melveena McKendrick Francine Masiello Beth Miller Elizabeth Ordóñez Rachel Phillips Marcia L. Welles This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.







Commonweal


Book Description




Between Two Worlds: The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz


Book Description

The seventeenth-century Mexican poet, playwright and nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is best known for her secular works, most notably her damning indictment of male double standards, Hombres necios (Stupid Men). However, her autos sacramentales (allegorical one-act plays on the Eucharist) have received little attention, and have only been discussed individually and out of sequence. By examining them as a collection, in their original order, their meaning and importance are revealed.  The autos combine Christian and classical ‘pagan’ imagery from the ‘Old World’ with the conquest and conversion of the ‘New World’. As the plays progress, the mystery of Christ’s ‘greatest gift’ to mankind is deciphered and is mirrored in Spain’s gift of the True Faith to the indigenous Mexicans. Sor Juana’s own image is also situated within this baroque landscape: presented as a triumph of Spanish imperialism, an exotic muse between two worlds.




Sor Juana, Or, The Traps of Faith


Book Description

A life of the seventeenth-century poet, intellectual, and feminist who became a nun and eventually gave up secular learning, places her in her times and in Spanish intellectual tradition, and examines the contradictions in her personality.







The Routledge Research Companion to the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz


Book Description

Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women’s and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.