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ANA CARO DE MALLÉN

Ana Caro, born around the 1600s in Seville or Granada and possibly into slavery, was a highly accomplished poet and playwright of the Spanish Golden Age. Primarily having written comedias, autos sacramentales, and relacions, Caro, like many of the professional writers at the time, was commissioned to write much of her works. She is arguably one of the first professional female writers to emerge in Spain and Europe. 

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Caro's writing was evocative of the literary traditions present in Early Modern Spanish text. Her comedias were especially in line with the dramatic conventions set out by the highly influential Spanish dramatist Lope De Vega. Much like her contemporaries who engaged with the comedia, Caro used stock-in-trade comedia devices such as stock characters, fast-paced turns of plot, and themes surrounding the nature of illusion in contrast to reality. Caro also filled her comedias with metatheatrical elements such as the use of fantastical characters who had elaborate entrances and exits. Caro was known to incorporate Spanish Baroque rhetoric and epistemology into her dramas, imbuing her text with metaphors, similes, and the dizzying search for objective truth. 

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Although not much is known about the highly lauded playwright, her extant texts include two surviving full-length plays: El conde Partinuplés (Count Partinuplés) and Valor, Agravio y Mujer (Valor, Outrage and Woman or The Courage to Right a Woman's Wrongs). 

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