Capturing the Pícaro in Words

Download or read book Capturing the Pícaro in Words written by Konstantin Mierau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing the Pícaro in Words discusses the framing of the transient marginals of early modern Madrid in the literary pícaro. It compares the perceptions of constables, shopkeepers, and criminals, to those of mass-produced literary representations, and argues that the literary representations "displaced" the pícaro, assigning the marginals different places in the literary texts in order to centralise the problem of urban vagrancy. The texts "spanished" the pícaro, thus establishing the image of a culturally homogenous group; and lastly, "silenced" the pícaro, under-representing the power marginals in the city derived from their knowledge of the information flows in the city.