Inventing America in Baroque Italy: Columbus, Vespucci, and New World Epic

FAIN: FEL-262356-19

Nathalie Hester
University of Oregon (Eugene, OR 97403-5219)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on 16th- and 17th-century Italian epic poems about the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

“Inventing America in Baroque Italy” examines the ways in which, at a time when most of the Italian peninsula was a colony of Spain, seventeenth-century Italian poets represent Italy’s role in the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Taking as its corpus eleven epic poems written in the Italian vernacular between 1596 and 1650, my book considers the relationship between baroque epic poetry and local politics; between Italian poems about the Americas and Spanish colonialism; and between literary production and emerging notions of Italian identity. A principal argument of this study is that the heated debates about representing Columbus and Vespucci as epic heroes inevitably point to concerns about Europe’s global expansion and Italy’s role in that expansion. This project sheds light on texts that have not received adequate attention in studies of early modern European colonialism and in scholarship on the reception of the Americas in seventeenth-century Italy.

Associated Products

“Transnationalism and the Epic Tradition in Baroque Italian Travel Literature.” (Article)
Title: “Transnationalism and the Epic Tradition in Baroque Italian Travel Literature.”
Author: Nathalie Hester
Abstract: This article is a book chapter in the volume Transnational Italian Studies, edited by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi(2020). In this study I demonstrate how two seemingly disparate texts—Pietro Della Valle’s travel letters and Girolamo Bartolomei Smeducci’s epic poem, L’America—both offer a literary antidote to the Italian peninsula’s subservience to the Habsburg Empire and vulnerability to Ottoman power. The two works establish textual authority and appeal to the tastes of readers by grounding their representation of travel—sometimes with irony—by following the parameters of the epic genre and promoting a vision of global Catholic dominance and the enduring cosmopolitan prestige of Italian letters.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9781789627299/
Primary URL Description: Catalog of books published by Liverpool University Press.
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Other
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

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