Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works

Download or read book Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works written by Juana Inés de la Cruz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America's great poet rendered into English by the world's most celebrated translator of Spanish-language literature. Sor Juana (1651–1695) was a fiery feminist and a woman ahead of her time. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she was very much a public intellectual. Her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico," names that continue to resonate. An illegitimate child, self-taught intellectual, and court favorite, she rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age. This volume includes Sor Juana's best-known works: "First Dream," her longest poem and the one that showcases her prodigious intellect and range, and "Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz," her epistolary feminist defense—evocative of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Dickinson—of a woman's right to study and to write. Thirty other works—playful ballads, extraordinary sonnets, intimate poems of love, and a selection from an allegorical play with a distinctive New World flavor—are also included.