The Americas

Abstract

The beginning of American literature as American is Latinate by virtue of the fact that it is written in a Latin language, or some version of it. Beyond the chronicle of exploration and the propagandistic paean to the marvels of the New World aimed at justifying investment in and attracting colonists to the transatlantic territories, poetic forms dominate the literary production of the colonial period in Latin America. But the beginning of European exploration is usually traced to the Frenchman Jacques Cartier, who in 1534 claimed Canada for France. Smith's work is imbued with a mythologizing sense of America as the "manifest destiny" of European (English) imperial expansion and a suitable theater for heroic individualities. While operating as a "beginning" for countless secular, individual but nevertheless representative stories, the historical rupture that creates the United States of America also stands at the intersection of an everyday chronology with a millennial temporality.