Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Table of ContentsA Note on the Text
Abbreviations
Illustration
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Negotiating Rumor and Fame: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Posthumous
Fama Chapter 1: The
Fama: A Posthumous Imaging and Imagining of Sor Juana
Chapter 2: Soaring Above the Rest: Sor Juana as the “Sacred Phoenix” and the
Fama as Moral Exhortation
Chapter 3: Light from the New World: Posthumous Praise for an American Mind
Chapter 4: With “Quills of Ink” and “Wings of Fragile Paper”: Sor Juana Responds to Her Public Image
Afterword (Or Why Think of the
Fama as a Success if it Fails on Almost all Fronts?)
