SOURCE: Sieber, Harry. “Literary Continuity, Social Order, and the Invention of the Picaresque.” In Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, edited by Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, pp. 143-64. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

In the essay which follows, Sieber approaches the development of the picaresque tradition from a socio-political perspective, suggesting that this literary genre reflected issues relating to the court of Phillip III.

In the exploration of various interrelations between literature and history in the second half of the sixteenth century in Spain, my main interests are those points of contact between literature as a process of imitation and renewal, of “new” texts re-creating “old” texts on the one hand, and historical tradition on the other, or rather, tradition as a cultural force in history. “For the literary historian and critic”—and here I intentionally abuse a quotation from Robert Weimann in order to...