Travels without a hippogriff: Empire, cartography and literature in early modern Spain

This dissertation examines the relationship between literature, cartography, and the imperial imaginary of the Early Modern Hispanic world. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed profound transformations in the ways Europeans constructed space, as European monarchies reorganized themselves into modern states, extended their dominion to newly discovered lands, and gave graphic form to these new spaces in both verbal and iconographic texts. Here, the spatial practices of Early Modern cartography provide models for analyzing a series of Spanish attempts to figure the Americas on the page, including the "Second Letter from Mexico" by Hernan Cortes, La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla, and La aurora en Copacabana by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. This particular itinerary through Early Modern Hispanic discourse attempts to assert the relevance to our understanding of Early Modern Spanish culture of texts from the canon of "Colonial Latin American" literature, those by Cortes and Ercilla. It attempts to do so by understanding them as metropolitan representations of peripheral locations, representations for which Calderon's play serves as an emblem.;Each analysis explores different ways in which verbal texts can be understood as "cartographies," that is, as attempts to figure a colonial geography, and to construct a space that mediates between that geography and the metropolitan center. They do so by moving between these canonical texts and lesser-known texts from the Spanish and European tradition of geographic writing. The cartographies that emerge from these texts are understood as anxious attempts to figure conquistatorial itineraries and geographies without recourse to the ahistorical devices of romance, but while preserving the dreams of totality proper to romance. The result is an ambivalent discourse which both figures and subverts its own geographic inventions. The varieties and ambivalence of these textual cartographies, furthermore, point to some of the convergences and divergences between the Spanish imperial imaginary and the spatial imagination of an emergent modernity.