• “Secular Women Writers of Colonial Spanish America.”

    Author(s):
    Rocío Quispe-Agnoli (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    LLC Colonial Latin American, TC Women’s and Gender Studies
    Subject(s):
    Women authors, Sixteenth century, Seventeenth century, Literature, Atlantic Ocean Region, Spanish literature
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Spanish women's writings, Latin American women's writings, female authorship, secular women writers, New World, Colonial Latin American literature, Early modern women writers, Transatlantic literatures, Early modern Spanish literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/95nk-vw98
    Abstract:
    New directions of research in colonial women’s studies on gender roles, periphery and margins, and discursive practices that expand the notion of “literary text” (Adorno 177), indicate that the textual corpus of colonial women’s writings continues to increase. This emergent group of texts reveals patterns of rhetorical strategies and recurrent themes such as feminine weakness and the rhetoric of modesty, motherhood, and family, daily life and domesticity, comments on public matters, sponsorship, fiduciary transactions, petitions, and recommendations of relatives or servants, among others (Daybell 182). The discursive analysis of these textual patterns gives us access to vital and affective experiences of women in sixteenth to eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America (Baranda Leturio 127-31, Vollendorf 82). A review of the literary production of these Spanish and Creole women confirms that theirs were not unique or isolated cases that occurred only in certain areas of Spanish America. Instead, women’s literary experiences took shape beyond the circles controlled by patriarchal institutions at that time. This tradition constitutes a field that required many studies and includes such themes as the perception and expression of affect and emotions, the feminine experiences of daily activities beyond the convent, and the church, the commercial activities of women commoners as well as aristocrats, the circulation of ideas and visual images in the colonies, and the written expressions of public and personal themes that caught women’s attention. The revelation of this tradition increases every year thanks to the industrious work of new studies in archives and repositories of documents; however, still more needs to be done to make visible the textual and literary production of secular women in colonial Spanish America.
    Notes:
    Quispe-Agnoli, R. “Secular Women Writers of Colonial Spanish America.” Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers. Eds. Anne Cruz & Nieves Baranda. New York: Routledge, 2017 (online edition), 2018 (print), p. 329-345. 2018 Best Collaborative Project on Women and Gender, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.
    Metadata:
    Published as:
    Book chapter    
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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