Abstract
Exploring the impact of contact with America on Renaissance writers, this paper explores how this newly discovered paradise, figured as a garden of earthly delights, urged early modern Europeans to start over and to create both a new life and a better world. This study presents a new framework for understanding how Europeans perceived the so-called “new world” and how such perceptions shaped transatlantic colonialism.This study is relevant to scholars of colonialism as it considers both the cultural motivations of the colonizers and the effect of the Age of Encounters on their collective consciousness. This study is framed in literary and cultural studies. It reviews critical texts by Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Cervantes, and Tasso. Taking a Jungian approach, it identifies how Renaissance writers relied on deeply embedded archetypes to interpret this newly “revealed” other side of the world. The primary result is a deeper understanding of how early modern Europeans interpreted the ontological significance of the world “beyond the curve of the sea.” Informed by a cultural nostalgia for a prelapsarian past and an intellectual fascination with antiquity, many Renaissance works suggest that this “brave new world” is linked to an even older world. Concomitantly, this return to the past permits the “old man” to experience the cradle of humanity in its pristine state, offering a chance to heal the wounds of Eden. This study and the deeper understanding it offers represents a means of reconciling the modern descendants of both the colonizers and the colonized.
Presenters
Mary WattProfessor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Office of the Dean, University of Florida, Florida, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Colonialism, Age of Encounters, Early Modern Literature, Archetypes, Apocalypticism
