Stephanie Merrim – författare

Winner, Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Modern Language Association, 2010The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture tracks the three spectacular forces of New World literary culture-cities, festivals, and wonder-from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, from the Old World to the New, and from Mexico to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It treats a multitude of imperialist and anti-imperialist texts in depth, including poetry, drama, protofiction, historiography, and journalism. While several of the landmark authors studied, including HernÁn CortÉs and Sor Juana InÉs de la Cruz, are familiar, others have received remarkably little critical attention. Similarly, in spotlighting creole writers, Merrim reveals an intertextual tradition in Mexico that spans two centuries. Because the spectacular city reaches its peak in the seventeenth century, Merrim's book also theorizes and details the spirited work of the New World Baroque. The result is the rich examination of a trajectory that leads from the Renaissance ordered city to the energetic revolts of the spectacular city and the New World Baroque.

Called the "Quintessence of the Baroque" and "Bridge to the Enlightenment," Mexican writer and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has also been celebrated as the "First Feminist of the New World." Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz fills a gap in the scholarship on Sor Juana by exploring the implications of her feminist staus in literary and cultural terms.Editor Stephanie Merrim's introduction surveys key issues in Sor Juana criticism from a feminist literary perspective and suggests a blueprint for future studies. Essays by Dorothy Schons and Asunción Lavrin reconstitute essential dimensions or Sor Juana's world, addressing biographical questions about the norms and values of religious life. Moving from social norms to their verbal expression, Josefina Ludmer reads Sor Juana's Respuesta for its stratagems of resistance, and Stehanie Merrim uncovers in Sor Juana's theater the encoded drama of the conflicted creative woman.

This book maps the field of seventeenth-century women's writing in Spanish, English, and French and situates the work of Sor Juana more clearly within that field. It holds up the multi-layered, proto-feminist writings of Sor Juana as a meaningful lens through which to focus the literary production of her female contemporaries. Merrim's book advances the integration of Hispanic women authors and women's issues into the panorama of early modern women's writing and opens up unexplored commonalities between Sor Juana and her sister writers.Early modern women writers whose works are explored include Marie de Gournay, Margaret Fell Fox, Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, St. Teresa, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish.Merrim's study provides a full-bodied picture of the resources that the cultural and historical climates of the seventeenth century placed at the disposal of women writers, the manners in which women writers instrumentalized them, the building blocks and concerns of early modern women's writing, and the continuities between early modern and modern women's writing.Written in an engaging, clear manner, this innovative study will be of interest not only to Hispanists but also to scholars in early modern studies, women's studies, history, and comparative literature.

This book maps the field of seventeenth-century women's writing in Spanish, English, and French and situates the work of Sor Juana more clearly within that field. It holds up the multi-layered, proto-feminist writings of Sor Juana as a meaningful lens through which to focus the literary production of her female contemporaries. Merrim's book advances the integration of Hispanic women authors and women's issues into the panorama of early modern women's writing and opens up unexplored commonalities between Sor Juana and her sister writers.Early modern women writers whose works are explored include Marie de Gournay, Margaret Fell Fox, Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, St. Teresa, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish.Merrim's study provides a full-bodied picture of the resources that the cultural and historical climates of the seventeenth century placed at the disposal of women writers, the manners in which women writers instrumentalized them, the building blocks and concerns of early modern women's writing, and the continuities between early modern and modern women's writing.Written in an engaging, clear manner, this innovative study will be of interest not only to Hispanists but also to scholars in early modern studies, women's studies, history, and comparative literature.

Examines twentieth-century Mexican literature and philosophy within the broad panorama of Latin American and European existentialisms.With their emphasis on freedom and engagement, European existentialisms offered Latin Americans transformative frameworks for thinking and writing about their own locales. In taking up these frameworks, Latin Americans endowed them with a distinctive ethos, a turn towards questions of identity and ethics. Stephanie Merrim situates major literary and philosophical works-by the existentialist Grupo Hiperión, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, and Rodolfo Usigli-within this dynamic context. Collectively, their writings manifest an existentialist ethos attuned to the matters most alive and pressing in their specific situations-matters linked to gender, Indigeneity, the Mexican Revolution, and post-Revolution politics. That each of these writers orchestrates a unique center of gravity renders Mexican existentialist literature an always shifting, always passionate adventure. A Latin American Existentialist Ethos takes readers on this adventure, conveying the passions of its subjects lucidly and vibrantly. It is at once a detailed portrait of twentieth-century Mexican existentialism and an expansive look at Latin American literary existentialism in relation-and opposition-to its European counterparts.