I turn now to two texts on the expansion and consolidation of Spain's empire, whose allegiances to literary precursors compromise their imperial loyalties. Riven by American and European struggles, Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana (1569–1597) and Ginés Pérez de Hita's Guerras civiles de Granada (1595, 1604) evince the difficulty of finding a rhetorical position from which to narrate empire. In their effort to both accommodate and challenge Spanish expansionism, these literary mongrels constantly combine and reshape generic parameters. Their formal legerdemain offers new insights into the ideological stakes of imitation. Do the vexed instances of ventriloquism, quotation, and allusion – i.e. of literary mimesis – in these texts accrete into a poetics of protest? Do these gestures actively dissimulate ideological questionings within the texts, or do they merely signal their deep ambivalence?

Although La Araucana and Part I of the Guerras civiles de Granada were historical contemporaries as bestsellers in the 1590s, even traveling together to the Americas, they have not been examined side by side. Pairing them underscores the global character of Spanish empire in the sixteenth century and its large and uneven reach both within and without the Iberian Peninsula. It also exposes the metropole's own sense of vulnerability to the depredations of the Ottoman empire – especially during the second “guerras civiles” that Pérez de Hita chronicles – a vulnerability that contrasts sharply with our own modern sense of Spain's monolithic conquering power.