The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz traces the meteoric trajectory of the Mexican Tenth Muse’s renown and studies how her worldly celebrity was altered posthumously by elegists in her Fama y obras póstumas [Fame and Posthumous Works] of 1700. In this study of a polyphonic, transatlantic volume, the didactic framework of early modern fame is pushed to its limits as panegyrists inscribe the nun into an evolving world-view that could trade in the fictions of the saintly exemplar, the Tenth Muse or a New World treasure, but could not preserve a woman’s renown on the grounds of authorship. Only by making her legible could she vie for the promise of posthumous fame. In flushing out the machinations of Sor Juana’s role as agent of her own celebrity as well as the negotiations of her contemporaries, this book opens new lines of inquiry in the study of early modern fame and print culture and the role of writers, panegyrists and editors as cultural agents in the transatlantic literary relationship between Mexico and Spain.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- A Note on the Text
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Negotiating Rumor and Fame: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Posthumous Fama
- Sor Juana, Agent of Her Own Celebrity Status
- The Fama and Sor Juana’s Retreat from Public Life
- Exempla, Edification, Posterity and the Written Word
- More Than a Sourcebook
- Chapter Outline
- Appendix
- 1. The Fama
- A Posthumous Imaging and Imagining of Sor Juana
- The Engraved Portrait: Gateway to the Volume
- The Fama’s Prologue: A Guide to Unearthing the Volume’s Structure
- A Private Dialogue Made Public: Sor Juana Engages the Editor of Her Fama
- Conclusions
- Appendix
- 2. Soaring above the Rest
- Sor Juana as “Sacred Phoenix” and the Fama as Moral Exhortation
- Tales of Virtues: Posthumous Fame for Holy Women of Seventeenth-Century Mexico
- Father Calleja Tries His Hand at Hagiography
- Paying Homage to Sor Juana’s Spiritual and Literary Desengaño
- Conclusions
- Appendix
- 3. Light from the New World
- Posthumous Praise for an American Mind
- Sor Juana, An American Treasure
- American Tributes: Sor Juana and a New World Order
- Not Woman at All?: Sor Juana and the Discourse of New World Abundance
- Conclusions
- Appendix
- 4. With “Quills of Ink” and “Wings of Fragile Paper”
- Sor Juana Responds to Her Public Image
- Sor Juana as Panegyrist: In Praise of Doña María de Guadalupe de Lencastre
- Sor Juana Vilifies and Promotes Her Renown in the Respuesta
- “I Have No Knowledge of These Things”: Sor Juana’s Careful Crafting of Her Literary Self-Portraits
- Conclusions
- Appendix
- Afterword (Or Why Think of the Fama as a Success If It Fails on Almost All Fronts?)
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
- Figure 1. Frontispiece of the Fama y obras pósthumas. Madrid, 1700. Courtesy of theJohn Carter Brown Library at Brown University
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
Login to your account