The Epic of Florida

This classroom-ready volume presents three substantial poems: Juan de Castellanos’s Elegy to Ponce de León, Bartolomé de Flores’s Memoir of the Happy Result, and Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo’s La Florida. Each text is introduced with clear headnotes and annotations, and a critical introduction situates la Florida within the broader imperial, cultural, and religious context of the Spanish Golden Age. Comparative “galleries” offer additional sources to help students understand how early poets interpreted exploration, conquest, and missionary encounters.

By recovering this overlooked corpus, The Epic of Florida reframes colonial American literature as a multilingual, transatlantic project that predates the United States. The volume makes long and difficult poems accessible and engaging for classroom use, while opening new directions for research. It is ideal for courses in world literature, American and Latin American studies, and colonial history and will also interest Latin Americanists, scholars of Spanish and US literature, and general readers drawn to the early cultural history of Florida.

Thomas Hallock is Professor of English and Florida studies at the University of South Florida. He has been researching, writing about, and teaching the early literature of la Florida for thirty years. Hallock’s previous books include From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral; A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst; and Happy Neighborhood: Essays and Poems.

History

           Early Modern

           Latin American

           U.S.

Latin American Studies

           History

           Literature

Literary Studies

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Early Modern History

           Early Modern