Nature, eroticism and fantasy. The body in the love sonnets of hispanoamerican women poets

Abstract

In this paper we will analyze a series of poems of the "love sonnet" type, written by women in the Spanish
language, between Spain and Latin America, from the 16th century to the 20th century. To carry out this analysis we will be guided by a hypothesis: that in these sonnets the body occupies a central place. There, the body is thematized in terms of love, and love is understood as a combination of nature, eroticism and/or fantasy. I will be tracing this hypothesis in a series of writers who, over five centuries, range from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, to Alfonsina Storni and Juana de Ibarbourou, just to name the most famous. To see to what extent their ideas about the body and love are based on a certain concept of nature, a certain primacy of the erotic and a certain notion of fantasy, we will rely on a broad theoretical framework, which ranges from romanticism to feminism, passing through psychoanalysis, critical theory and poststructuralism.