Picaro and Cortesano (eBook)

Pícaro and Cortesano have been traditionally viewed as antithetical figures representing a strict spatial metaphor between center and periphery. This book challenges that view by positing a relationship between these two significant figures and their respective books, picaresque narrative and courtesy manual. The handbook of conduct tacitly engages the question of identity by offering a model for fashioning the self, while picaresque narrative explicitly reflects on how identity is constituted and sustained. The book argues that pícaro and cortesano rely upon a range of shared cultural, social and symbolic resources or capital to fashion, maintain and enhance their identity and position.

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In this book on the relationship between pcaro and cortesano, Felipe E. Ruan argues that these two cultural figures are linked by a shared form of deportment centered on prudent self-accommodation. This behavior is generated and governed by a courtly ethos or habitus that emerges as the result of the growth and influence of the court in Madrid. Ruan posits that both pcaro and cortesano, and their respective books, conduct manual and picaresque narrative, tacitly engage questions of identity and individualism by highlighting the valued resources or forms of capital that come to fashion and sustain self-identity. He places the books of the pcaro and cortesano within the larger polemic of early modern identity and individualism, and offers an account of the individual as agent whose actions are grounded on objective social relations, without those actions being simply the result of mechanistic adherence to the social order.