Panel Discusses Early Latin American Novel on Lesbianism

David Foster Wallace, Daniel Balderston, Ariana Vigil, and María de Guzmán
David William Foster, Regents Professor, Arizona State University; Daniel Balderston, Mellon Professor, University of Pittsburgh; Ariana Vigil, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill; and María DeGuzmán, Director of Latina/o Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill

On November 18, Wilson Library and the Rare Book Collection hosted a panel discussion sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies. The topic was the recently published novel En los jardines de Lesbos, written by José María Vargas Vila in the late 1920s. In 2010, the RBC acquired the original manuscript of the heretofore unpublished work about a lesbian artist, along with other papers of the controversial Colombian-born writer.

Vargas_Vila
Manuscript of En los jardines de Lesbos from the José María Vargas Vila Papers, Collection 12019, Rare Book Literary and Historical Papers

UNC-Chapel Hill’s own Juan Carlos González Espitia, associate professor of Romance Studies, edited La cosecha del sembrador, which includes En los jardines de Lesbos. The volume from the Colombian publisher Panamericana also contains Vargas Vila’s little-known work Ítalo Fontana, a novel about incest.

Vargas Vila died before he was able to publish En los jardines de Lesbos. The evening’s panelists debated the work’s relationship to earlier, contemporaneous, and later Latin American writing and conjectured on what its publication would have meant in its own era. Professor DeGuzmán drew comparisons with English literature, including Radcliffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928) and the earlier poetry of Swinburne.

About seventy members of the University community listened to the panel discussion. The Vargas Vila papers, part of Rare Book Literary and Historical Papers, are available to researchers in Wilson’s 4th floor manuscript reading room. The Rare Book Collection’s extensive holdings of his published works are accessible in the originals at Wilson’s 2nd floor reading room and online at the José María Vargas Vila Digital Library.

Feminists of the 17th Century

The Rare Book Collection is pleased to celebrate Women’s History Month by highlighting two recent acquisitions by notable female authors. It just so happened that last month, we were in the right place at the right time to acquire two exemplary works by women writers. Adding to the serendipity of it all is the fact that the books in question were published within a year of one another, in 1688 and 1689.

PR1213 .P6 1688 / William A. Whitaker Fund

The earlier volume is Jane Barker’s Poetical Recreations: Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, &c. with Several New Translations (London, 1688). According to Kathryn King’s book Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725 (Oxford, 2000): “By any reckoning Jane Barker was a remarkable figure. A devoted Jacobite who followed the Stuarts into exile, a learned spinster who dabbled in commercial medicine, a novelist who wrote one of very few accounts of female same-sex desire in early modern Britain, she was also one of the most important women writers to enter the literary market-place during the Augustan period.” Poetical Recreations is her only volume of verse, and our particular copy of it is an appealing one, complete with the license leaf bearing the woodcut publisher’s device.

PQ7296 .J6 A6 1689 superv’d / Leslie Weil Memorial Fund

Our second acquisition was published the following year in Madrid and is nothing less than the first book of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, widely regarded today as the first published feminist of the New World. A child prodigy who was born in Mexico in the middle of the seventeenth century, Sor Juana has been lauded as the most outstanding writer of the Spanish American colonial period. In the twentieth century, scholars rediscovered her poetry, and she is now taught as part of the Baroque literary canon, including here at UNC Chapel Hill. Indeed, UNC’s Prof. Rosa Perelmuter is the author of two books on Sor Juana: Noche intelectual: la oscuridad idiomática en el Primero sueño (Mexico, 1982), and Los límites de la femineidad en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: estrategías retóricas y recepción literaria (Pamplona, 2004).

The volume that the Rare Book Collection has purchased is, quite wonderful to say, the first edition of Sor Juana’s first book, Inundación castálida de la única poetisa, musa dézima, Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz, religiosa professa en el Monasterio de San Gerónimo de la Imperial Ciudad de México (Madrid, 1689). This rare edition is truly a touchstone for those studying Spanish and New World literature, and we look forward to sharing it with students and scholars.

Both  Inundación castálida and Barker’s Poetical Recreations build upon RBC’s strong holdings of women writers and give witness to the enormous literary contributions of women over the centuries.