Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities

This work focuses on colonial literary elites in Ibero- and British America. Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as 'creoles' who moved from the Old World to the New World, this collection of eighteen original essays investigates the creolization of literary forms and genres in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. ""Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas"" facilitates a cross-disciplinary, intrahemispheric, and Atlantic comparison of early settlers' colonialism and creole elites' relation to indigenous peoples and imperial regimes. Contributors explore literatures written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English and creole responses to communal identity, local patriotism, nationalism, and literary expression.The essays take the reader from the first debates about cultural differences that underpinned European ideologies of conquest to the transposition of European literary tastes into New World cultural contexts, and from the natural science discourse concerning creolization to the literary manifestations of creole patriotism.