Studies on Women's Poetry of the Golden Age

Tras el espejo la musa escribe

Julián Olivares

• Publisher: Tamesis Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781855661820
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781846157653
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of fourteen scholarly essays on women's poetry from Spain's early modern period shows that women did indeed have a Golden Age, and that they were significant cultural actors in the realms of poetic production. The studies of secular verse demonstrate how female poets of this period devised strategies to confront the dominant masculine poetic discourse, while the essays on sacred poetry explore the multiple manifestations of female piety and mysticism. The women's words are brought to life and modern readers helped to understand the socio-cultural, interpersonal, and aesthetic components of the poets' oeuvre. The volume, a companion to Julián Olivares' and Elizabeth Boyce's revised anthology "Tras el espejo la musa escribe": Lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro, constitutes an authoritative critical enterprise focused on the recuperation of the female literary voice, and marks an important step forward in the battle to include women's writing as part of Spain's literary canon. Contributors: Electa Arenal, Aránzazu Borrachero Mendíbil, Anne J. Cruz, Adrienne L. Martin, Rosa Navarro Durán, Julián Olivares, Inmaculada Osuna, Amanda Powell, Elizabeth Rhodes, Stacey Schlau, Lía Schwartz, Alison Weber, Judith Whitenack. JULIAN OLIVARES is Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and editor of Calíope, Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry.

Table of contents

• FRONTCOVER
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD: El arte de la dificultad en la lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro
• INTRODUCTION
• Secular Poetry
• Vir melancholicus/femina tristis: Towards a Poetics of Women’s Loss
• “¡Oh qué diversas estamos, / dulce prenda, vos y yo!” Multiple Voicings in Love Poems to Women by Marcia Belisarda, Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, and Sor Violante del Cielo
• El autorretrato en la poesía de Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán
• Female Burlesque and the Everyday
• Cristobalina Fernández de Alarcón y la poesía de circunstancias
• Poems by Cristobalina Fernández de Alarcón in Two Famous Baroque Anthologies: Primera y Segunda Parte de las Flores de poetas ilustres de España
• Ana Abarca de Bolea: “Los lucimientos de las mujeres”
• Could Women Write Mystical Poetry? The Literary Daughters of Juan de la Cruz
• Gender in the Night: Juan de la Cruz and Cecilia del Nacimiento
• María de San Alberto: Bridging Popular and “High” Spanish Poetic Traditions through the Sacred
• Sex and Class in the Seventeenth-Century Cloister: Sor Marcela de San Félix’s Love Poems to God
• Words Made Flesh: Luisa de Carvajal’s Eucharistic Poetry
• Sor María de la Antigua’s Coloquios with Examiners, Editors, Saints, and God
• AFTERWORD
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX