TOWARDS A POETICS OF NEW SPAIN HAGIOGRAPHIES. THE CASE OF THE “LIFE” OF CATARINA DE SAN JUAN BY ALONSO RAMOS

Even though the publication and importation of imaginative literature was prohibited in New Spain, high-ranking clergy from the Company of Jesus produced hagiographies with all of the characteristics of a hybrid novel: part epic, part picaresque. For that reason, this work proposes that the hagiographies constitute the first, New Spain novels. By analyzing the most voluminous hagiography written in the seventeenth century, the life of Catarina de San Juan by Alonso Ramos, the research aims to formulize a hagiographic poetics made up of techniques from the epic and the picaresque novel to narrate the life of the protagonist.