An Epic Return(s) Gaspar de Villagra and His Historia de la nveva Mexico in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

Neglected and scorned for most of the past four centuries, Gaspar de Villagra's long poem Historia de la nveva Mexico (1610) has made a remarkable comeback with critics and readers of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. This article proposes some explanations for that change of appreciation, including new approaches to literature and discourse analysis, a more nuanced understanding of the role of the reader, and sustained efforts to recover and reinterpret lost or forgotten texts of the past.