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  • Figures of America
  • Peter Mason
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed. America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. 441. $49.95. ISBN 0-8078-2166-7
D. A. Brading. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 722. $95. ISBN 0-521-39130-X
Philip P. Boucher. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Pp. 229. $35. ISBN 0-8018-4365-0
Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London & New York: Routledge, 1992. Pp. 250. $59.95. ISBN 0-415-06095-8
C. R. Boxer. The Golden Age of Brazil: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society, 1695–1750. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Pp. 458. $49.95. ISBN 0-312-12639-5
Anthony Pagden. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-c. 1800. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. 244. $30. ISBN 0-300-06415-2
Anthony Pagden. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993. Pp. 216. $30.75. ISBN 0-300-05285-5

As Karen Ordahl Kupperman states in the introduction to a collection of essays, America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, the quincentennial celebrations of the “discovery” of America tended to place more emphasis on the effects of exploration and colonization on the Americans and their lands and cultures than on the process of the reception of information about America by Europeans. Kupperman’s volume goes some way to redressing the balance, and a number of other publications that have appeared during the 1990s also help shed light on the impact of the New World on the Old.

This shift in emphasis often implies a heavier reliance on methods that are more familiar to scholars in the field of literary studies than to historians, since much of the material for gauging the consequences of the “discovery” of America is of a literary nature. This may result in a different approach to that textual material; rather than being regarded as a documentary source from which information [End Page 107] can be derived about the past, such material may be examined in the light of the textual strategy it deploys to produce a certain effect, a possible ‘reading’ of America. At times literary and historical criticism may proceed hand-in-hand; at other times their practitioners may find themselves at loggerheads.

These are the basic parameters along which I shall consider a number of these recent publications: the contrast between early images of America and the ‘reality’ of America to which historians in particular have devoted a lot of attention; and the contrast between a documentary approach to sources for what they can tell us about historical processes, on the one hand, and a textual approach to the same sources for a better understanding of the literary strategies they enact. Merely stating these oppositions is to overdraw them, for the distinctions are by no means hard and fast, as consideration of the publications under review will show. At the same time, I hope to demonstrate how, in terms of their underlying assumptions, there are some unexpected points of correspondence between scholars who would probably regard themselves as being poles apart. The figures of America are not just images; they are also rhetorical figures, intended to invent and reinvent convincing versions of ‘America’ for different readerships.

In what seems to be the most straightforward of the publications under review—D. A. Brading’s The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867—the author rather disarmingly refers to the original purpose of the book as being simply “what Greek historians called mimesis” (p. xvii). He sets out to demonstrate that, no matter how much Spanish America depended on Europe for its art forms, literature, and general culture, its chroniclers and patriots succeeded in creating an intellectual tradition that, by reason of its engagement with the historical experience and contemporary reality of America, was “original, idiosyncratic, complex, and quite distinct from any European model” (p...

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