ABSTRACT

Starting with a reading of Luís Vaz de Camões’s epic Os Lusíadas (‘The Lusiads’, 1572), this chapter argues that European expansion overseas played a central role in Europe’s self-definition through literature at the dawn of the modern age. Literature offered not only a reflection on current events, but also provided explorers, conquistadors and travellers with the conventions and literary forms to describe their experiences in “new” worlds. From the beginning, fact and fiction were difficult to separate. Authors’ positions varied from celebratory to critical; cultural relativism led some to question European values and institutions. Travel narratives produced new geographical, anthropological and scientific knowledge, while European expansion overseas impacted the eighteenth-century rise of the novel and its use of realism, or the exact description of things as they are in the real world. Ultimately, reflections on the atrocities associated with European expansion – including transatlantic slavery – and a growing recognition of their distorted representation of the non-European world, led authors from the former colonies to attempt to set the picture straight. A key strategy in this process was intertextuality, or critically rewriting the canonical texts of old, resulting in critiques of modernity that remain relevant today.