TEXTOS INAUGURALES: LOS RELATOS DE LOS VIAJEROS PATAGÓNICOS.

The corpus of the texts selected were written from the Discovery and Conquest periods to the end of the 18th century. In our opinion, those texts are of an impressive narrative quality. Their value resides in their literary essence --they are tales more than chronicles--, and in the fact that their authors were constrained by the Crown of Castille to write them. Apart from the linguistic difficulty those writers faced to communicate the experience of an unknown world, they had a particular and prejudiced vision of the events which made them assume a peculiar position by the time they described the observable universe. Considering the conquerors' writings, it is interesting to point out that they wrote from a more subjective point of view in accordance to the new literary patterns of the Modern Age. For this reason, particular stories stood out against general, natural and moral tales. As a matter of fact, Inca Garcilaso's Comentarios reales provided an accurate example of this. Such a piece of art provided the literary ground for the tale and other brief genres --tradition, among them-- to be born. This kind of stories appeared throughout the next centuries and constituted a strong stream for the Latin American literature. As far as the Patagonian literature is concerned, we will focus our study on the period 1870-191 , when the modern Argentina was emerging. We will look for formal aspects in the texts and the understanding of what we consider to be our own. This presupposes the difficulty of building the Patagonian identity upon European statements and oscillating visions or representations of Otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]