Travel Narratives and Spatiality in Chronicles of the American Conquest. Comparative notes

Abstract

Conquest journeys, travel narratives and imperial eyes gather together Latin American chronicles from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the last few decades, critics have revisited this corpus through written traditions such as travel narrative in Occidental Literature and have stressed the importance to take into consideration topics, rhetoric and poetic. However, a wider approach shows what’s to be done yet, especially regarding mestizo chronicles. In this article I will focus, firstly, in the main proposals connected to chronicles and travel writing; secondly, on a comparative approach between occidental chronicles and mestizo’s ones. Finally I provide an overview of the different approaches, by defining three analytical dimensions: nature, urban space, cartographic representations.