Abstract

This paper aims to be an initial approach to the way in which Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo puts up an specific discourse in his work at the time of describing the American city. Concretely, I have been interested in analyzing the ways the first chronicler of the American Indies adapts long-time used formulas from the old continent when he is introducing the reader to the new reality constituted by the American city. That is the case of Santo Domingo, a city to which Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was especially bounded. It will serve us as an example to study how the chronicler adapts the formula of the panegyric of the city to the New World.

Abstract

This  paper  poses  that,  in  order  to  represent  the  first  Spanish  conquests  in  the Antilles, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, within his Historia General y Natural de las Indias, takes certain official legal documents as models to guide and structure his account. Such documents are the royal ordinances and Palacios Rubios’ Requerimiento.  Consequently,  the  character’s speech  and  actions  are  marked  with  the  ideals  of  XVIth  century  humanist, Renaissance, and erasmist thought —peace, love-friendship  and the model of the prudent, moderate leaders— while a speech which seeks to legitimize the Spanish rules in the New World —while presenting it in terms of «pacification»— is being simultaneously unfolded. This whole discursive compound results in a plural, diverse and at times contradictory account, influenced and influential, and, above all, founding of some of the Utopian-imperial speech and imagery that were projected over the Americas and that constituted it.