Early Contact Souths

Abstract

Before the South was the South, it was la Florida and Virginia, the northern fringe of the Spanish Caribbean and the Western objective of French and English Atlantic colonization. These spaces were contested militarily and politically as well as textually—in narrative reports, epic histories, and even lyric poems. Europeans tried to define what is now the South in both definite and ambiguous terms, from the Florida Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico to some indeterminate place north and from the Atlantic coast to some vague line to the West. Epic and lyric poems by Spanish, French, and English writers appeared by writers who had traveled to la Florida and by some who had not. Adding to the mix, English attempts to establish a colony on Roanoke Island in the 1580s added a new name for much of the region, Virginia. Spain and England contested what was la Florida and what was Virginia as much in writing as on the ground. These works portrayed geographic borders, Edenic commodities, and fantastic peoples.