ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes three areas of common interest in the study of this genre in Sor Juana's production: the poet's contribution to the "baroquisation" of ballads, the dialogic nature of ballads, intertextual performances, and evidence of self-fashioning, and the expression of a seventeenth-century Creole subjectivity and its place in the politics of the empire. Romance has been much-studied as Sor Juana's late reflection about celebration, fame, and self-representation. Celebration, intertextual dialogues, and questions about their performance bring us to the second area of studies of Sor Juana's ballads, perhaps the most prolific since the 1980s. The purpose of Sor Juana's festive romances, similar to that of other occasional poetry of her time, as several studies have indicated, was to project an image of the subject that would magnify and glorify him/her in a utopian space and time. George Thomas has approached Romances 38 and 50 by paying attention to Sor Juana's subtle challenge to the imperial tradition of ceremonial literature.
