ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to revisit both the territory and the methodology of the New Historicist project as it relates to colonial studies, to listen perhaps a little more carefully to textual voices, and to offer some critical resistance to its streamlined procedures. It presents the contribution of early modern written narratives to the formation of "America" as a discursive formation, what Jose Rabasa calls a "thesaurus of New World motifs", that rendered the "New World" familiar to Europeans as "America". The story of how America acquired its name is a case in point. This landmass has been known, of course, by many names. And while many in Europe continued to refer to the region as the Indies, the term competed with "America" as early as 1507, when Martin Waldseemuller used the feminine, latinized version of Amerigo Vespucci's name on a map that accompanied an edition of Vespucci's letters.
