Balbuena's<i>Grandeza mexicana</i>and the American Georgic

The period 1500–1650 is the period during which Europe’s poetic traditions — of ultimately Greco-Roman (i.e. Mediterranean Basin) origin — first came to be systematically exported outside the strictly European geographical sphere: the new contexts offered by the Portuguese- and especially Spanish-controlled zones of the rapidly expanding Iberian imperial world is where this first took place. This chapter moves away from the time-honoured Eurocentrisms of some of the more traditional approaches to early modern poetics by insisting upon 1500–1650+ as precisely the period during which the European literary tradition began to take on a life, or lives, of its own elsewhere across the globe. After surveying the key literary-historical developments in this connection, the chapter proceeds to consider how the Americas themselves came to be figured and indeed forged as a new zone of poetic activity — a new poetic(s) space — in early modern Ibero-American poetry itself. The selection of tropes identified and surveyed in this part of the chapter is offered as a sample of the dynamic literary phenomena that make up what we can call the poetics of the New World.

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Balbuena'sGrandeza mexicanaand the American Georgic

Cited by 5 publications

References 23 publications

The Practice of Epic and Lyric Writing in Colonial Mexico

The Practice of Epic and Lyric Writing in Colonial Mexico

Una heroica dama ? The Discurso en loor de la poesía (1608) in context and the case for Diego Mexía as ‘Clarinda’

The Other Arena: Poetics Goes Global in the Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1650+

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