Affects, Self-fashioning and Narration in Conventual Writing. Ursula Suarez's Relacion autobiografica

The lives written by nuns in early modernity are crossed by a thick emotional rhetoric, in a field where affections are controlled, since they are considered to be bordering on vices, with the exception of divine love. In this work we focus on the network of affections, self-fashioning and narration in the Relacion autobiografica of the Chilean nun Ursula Suarez (1666-1749), which we will put in relation to other voices of conventual writing, as we consider that these texts outline certain female emotional and textual communities. In Spain, with the model and matrix of the genre, Santa Teresa de Avila (1515-1582), and with an anomalous case in her illiterate condition, Isabel de Jesus (1586-1648), and in colonial America, with the Mother Francisca Josefa del Castillo (1671-1742) and sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648?-1695). In the articulation of rhetoric of affects, strategies of figuration and narrative models, Ursula Suarez adjusts to the language, topics and models of the vida genre, but at the same time, she outlines a resistant and singular discourse.