The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz traces the meteoric trajectory of the Mexican Tenth Muses 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 womans 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 Juanas 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.
A 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?)
Margo Echenberg is an Academic Associate in Teaching and Learning Services at McGill University.
