CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER

IMAGINED WORLDS--NEW, OLD, AND "ALTERNATE"

                    Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas.  By Roland Greene.

                    Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe.  By Mary Baine Campbell.

THE BOOKS UNDER REVIEW share an interest in the tangled history of the European discovery, conquest, and, to use Montaigne's ("Des cannibales") sardonic metaphor, "digestion" of the New World. The first, Roland Greene's Unrequited Conquests, revisits a number of key texts from the initial "contact" period and the later sixteenth century in order to insert Petrarchan verse in an otherwise standard new historicist analysis of colonial encounter and exploitation. Columbus's reports of his exploration of the West Indies, Vaz de Caminha's chronicle of Cabral's expedition to Brazil, Léry's Histoire d'un voyage fait en la  terre du Brésil, the love poetry of Wyatt, Labé, and Cetina, Sydney's  Astrophil and Stella, and the "Inca" Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales de los Incas are thus adduced as evidence for the determining role the author alleges the conventions of Petrarchist lyric played in the cultural absorption  of the Americas. The second book, Mary Baine Campbell's Wonder & Science, sets New World literature in the wider context of early modern "world making," from Thevet's Singularitez de la France Antarctique and Cosmographie  universelle in the mid sixteenth century to Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages  amériquaines in the first third of the eighteenth. Campbell correlates travelers' accounts  of the Americas with cosmographers' attempts to map a dramatically enlarged and complicated planet, and then connects both endeavors with contemporary efforts to  rationalize and codify what eventually becomes the modern discipline of ethnography.  The rise of modern ethnography is in turn examined in relation to the institutionalization of the natural sciences (especially astronomy and "micrography"), the  emergence of a worldwide capitalist market, and the ever more rapid revolutions of  fashion--the restless vogues in dress and cosmetics that register capitalism's  growing grip on metropolitan as well as colonial mentalities. The ultimate horizon of  her investigations is the rise of the modern novel, which--she argues--fuses the positivist  ambitions of scientific discourse with the pleasures of aesthetically imagined rather  than methodically dissected worlds, pleasures from which science sets out to dissociate  itself.