An assault on the senses: the five senses in the literature of the Arauco War

Thesis

The Spanish Empire met its match at the edge of the known world, in the land of Wallmapu (now Chile), where the conflict between the Indigenous Reche and the invading Spanish Empire turned into the bloody and seemingly never-ending Arauco War. Following the Spanish historical and literary tradition of armas y letras, conquistadors and other members of the Chilean frontier society took up pens to write accounts of what they witnessed. In these accounts, soldiers’ bodily experiences, interpreted through their senses, became a critical means of communicating their privileged knowledge of the conflict that they, in turn, used to try to shape the future of the war. Each chapter of this thesis is dedicated to a different sense, tracing its contemporary and literary understanding from early modern Spain to Chile. Through this historicization of the senses, this thesis examines a range of canonical, less studied, and unstudied accounts of the Arauco War, arguing that the senses shaped the war, and the war shaped the senses. The study of the senses in Spanish American history and literature remains nascent, particularly for studies of smell and touch, with the limited scholarship focusing more on writings by letrados in Mexico City and Lima. This is the first monograph to draw on all five senses specifically in accounts from the periphery of the Spanish Empire and to focus on how the senses were understood by soldiers.

Authors: Newman, MK

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-0nxvv7g1z
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Arauco War; sensory studies; Chile; Spanish American literature
• Subjects: Chilean literature; Epic literature, Spanish