Winner of the 2017-18 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize
How did Spanish-American writers and veterans in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth century use epic poetry to search for ethical solutions
to the violent conflicts of their age?
The Epic Mirror studies how Spanish-American writers and veterans in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century used epic poetry to
search for ethical solutions to the violent conflicts of their age. The wars
about which they wrote took place at the frontiers of the Spanish empire,
where new political communities were emerging: fiercely independent
Amerindian republics, rebellious Spanish settlers, maroon kingdoms of
fugitive African slaves. This colonial reality generated a distinctive vision
of just warfare and political community.
Working across the fields of Hispanic literature, the history of political
thought, and studies of empire, colonialism and globalisation, Choi
reinterprets three major works of colonial Latin American literature:
Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana (1569-90), Pedro de Oña's Arauco
domado (1596), and Juan de Miramontes Zuázola's Armas
antárticas (1608-9). She argues that these works provide a rare insight
into the development of political thought in Viceregal Peru. Through the
imaginative mirrors of epic, the reader is forced to ask the same questions
of the unfinished conquests of the Americas as of those in Africa, Asia or
Europe: when conflicting forces are divided by irreconcilable world views,
even if the war is won, how is it possible to achieve peace?
