The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition): Including Sor Filotea's Letter and New Selected Poems

Defiant writing by the first feminist of the Americas--the Mexican nun Sor Juana In s de la Cruz--in response to the church officials that tried to silence her.

Known as the first feminist of the Americas, the Mexican nun Sor Juana In s de la Cruz enjoyed an international reputation as one of the great lyric poets and dramatists of her time. The Answer/La Respuesta (1691) is is Sor Juana's impassioned response to years of attempts by church officials to silence her. While earlier translators have ignored Sor Juana's keen awareness of gender, this volume brings out her own emphasis and diction, and reveals the remarkable scholarship, subversiveness, and even humor she drew on in defense of her cause.

This expanded, bilingual edition combines new research and perspectives on an inspired writer and thinker. It includes the fully annotated primary text responding to the church officials; the letter that ultimately provoked the writing of The Answer; an expanded selection of poems; an updated bibliography; and a new preface.

Author: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Publisher: Feminist Press
Published: 06/01/2009
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9781558615984
ISBN10: 1558615989
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | European | Spanish & Portuguese
- Literary Criticism | Poetry
- Literary Criticism | American | Hispanic & Latino

About the Author
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51-1695), a Mexican nun, was a brilliant poet, playwright, and essayist whose persistent defense of the intellectual rights of women brought her increasingly into conflict with church officials, who repeated tried to silence her. Sor Juana died by taking care her sister nuns during a plague in April 1695.

Electa Arenal, professor emerita of Hispanic and Women's Studies (City University of New York), is a translator and specialist in Hispanic monastic women's culture. Listed in Feminists Who Changed America, Arenal's fourth co-authored book, an illustrated, critical edition of Sor Juana's Neptuno alegórico, was published by Editorial Cátedra, in Spain.

Amanda Powell, award-winning poet and translator, teaches Latin American and Spanish literature and literary translation at the University of Oregon. Powell has published essays on: 16th- and 17th-century Spanish and Colonial Latin American women writers; convent writings; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; the boom in women's love poetry across 17th century Europe; and literary translation.