The comparative studies listed here strenuously resist simplifications and reductive conclusions. General overviews of literary history invite broad comparisons among vastly different cultures, societies, and individual situations. The task now is to shore up the gains of every approach, building on an understanding of how poetry works so as to enter the alien yet somehow familiar world of the Renaissance past with fresh eyes, open minds, and lively expectations. Older academic criticism has produced many fine analyses of form and meaning still worth learning from, and most of the recent studies in this bibliography continue to refer to them. Occasionally, this approach forfeits the subtlety and powerful nuance of poetry whose formal features might complicate rather than clarify difficult themes. In some cases, critics have approached individual poems as documentary evidence to support their interpretations of history. Scholarship and critical reading have approached European Renaissance texts with an urgency that speaks even to the crises and divisions of our own troubled times, whether in terms of gender, social class, religion, language, or racial difference. Her former convent is now the University of the Cloister for Sor Juana.Over the past two decades, critical emphases on social, cultural, and political topics in literary studies have greatly enriched our understanding and appreciation of poetic texts. Sor Juana – who has been pictured on Mexico’s 200-peso note – has been an inspiration and a focus of study for centuries. Nobel Prize winning author and poet Octavio Paz said of her poetry that it was the most important produced in the Americas until the advent of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. She died the following year at the age of 43, while nursing her sister nuns in the midst of an epidemic. In 1694 she signed documents that may have been conscious rejections of her past life and donated many of her books to help the suffering poor in the city. As a result of challenging societal values and ecclesiastical dogma she was officially censured. In her most famous work Reply to Sor Filotea she defended the intellectual rights of women and condemned the Church for helping keep women uneducated. Contemporaries gossiped about her liaisons with other nuns (and the wife of the viceroy of the Court of Mexico City), but it was her audaciously brilliant verse, and the threat to traditional authority it posed, that proved her undoing. In her work as in her life, she acknowledged being “en dos partes dividida (divided in two parts),” torn between passion and reason, sensuality and religious devotion. Her poetry and plays were widely read and brought her renown in Europe and Spanish America for celebrating the “magicas infusions (magical infusions)” of Native American cultures – all of which earned her a reputation as one of the greatest lyric poets of the Age. As a nun she was free to study the more than 4000 books she collected in her cell – one of the largest private libraries in the New World. With a remarkable aptitude for everything from Latin to geometry, she took her novitiate at the age of 16. "I don't study to know more, but to ignore less.”Įarly feminist Sor Juana was a 17th century poet, nun and scholar.
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