The Portuguese nun

Anna Klobucka

"This study describes and analyzes cultural and literary mythology surrounding the figure of the seventeenth-century nun Mariana Alcoforado as the presumed author of the celebrated collection of love letters that originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres portugaises (known in their many English editions as Portuguese Letters or Letters of a Portuguese Nun). Ostensibly written by a nun cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent to her departed lover, an officer in the French army, they are nowadays generally reputed to have been a literary fake authored by a seventeenth-century French writer.". "The Portuguese Nun describes the foundation and development of the myth of Soror Mariana and illuminates its continuing investment in the fabrication, by the country's cultural elite, of a shared national imagination. It examines the process of national...

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