in Spanish-American literature, short prose sketch in which a historical incident is related in an imaginative and literary style. An evocation of the South American past, the tradición may be set in the precolonial era, the age of discovery and conquest, the prerevolutionary era of romance and political intrigue, or the time of the struggle for self-determination in the 19th century. Stimulated by the Romanticists' search for national roots, the Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma (Palma, Ricardo) created the genre; his Tradiciones peruanas (1872–1910), an entertaining six-volume collection of anecdotes from five centuries of South American history, contains some of the most representative examples of the form.