Naves inventoras de regiones. Colonial Spanish American Epic Poetry and the Invention of America

Abstract

In La invención de América (1958), Edmundo O’Gorman highlighted the need to understand the discovery of the New World as an ontological process through which the Americas came to be conceived as an emerging geopolitical entity. This process was carried out through a series of historical accounts and pictorial productions that traced the contours of the New World and the meanings attributed to its history in accordance with European representational practices. I posit that poets of the Spanish colonies in the Americas produced a distinctive trend of epic poetry by transposing the semiotic and epistemological tools developed in the historical accounts of the early modern period. This specific trend, which I deem historiographical, allowed poets in the Americas to advance interpretations of a recent history of conquest and colonization built upon the poetization of early modern debates around historical truth, memory, and eyewitness testimony. By analyzing how the epic poems of the Americas contributed to the polemics of “the invention of America,” I trace a genealogy of works that converse simultaneously with the literary and historiographical tradition and thus allow us to further interrogate Latin America’s colonial history.Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.