"The imagination of the muses. Female authorship and literary creativity in the Mexican 19th Century"

"In the following pages, I propose a review of the symbolic displacements of the concept of authorship as a function of the social subject —male or female— who writes in the context of 19th Century Mexico, marked by sexual binarism. As the feminine word gained ground in material supports, mainly journalistic, women built representations of the female writer that were soon questioned by the 19th Century literary culture, mesocratic and patriarchal. To this end, I will stick to a handful of key texts located in the press to expose this phenomenon, by analyzing the discursive marks that served to legitimize the differences between female and male creativity. In particular, I will examine the discursive devices that made it possible for a woman of this period to imagine and define herself as an author, revealing the incidence of gender in the process of articulating a national literary field, eminently shaped by androcentric laws.Keywords: female authority; writer; imagination; gender; literary field"