The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature

From the Sixteenth Century to the Neopicaresque

J. A. Garrido Ardila

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781107031654
• eBook ISBN: 9781316308660
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the sixteenth century, Western literature has produced picaresque novels penned by authors across Europe, from Alemán, Cervantes, Lesage and Defoe to Cela and Mann. Contemporary authors of neopicaresque are renewing this traditional form to express twenty-first-century concerns. Notwithstanding its major contribution to literary history, as one of the founding forms of the modern novel, the picaresque remains a controversial literary category, and its definition is still much contested. The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature examines the development of the picaresque, chronologically and geographically, from its origins in sixteenth-century Spain to the neopicaresque in Europe and the United States.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• Notes on contributors
• Chapter 1 Origins and definition of the picaresque genre
• Chapter 2 Lazarillo de Tormes and the dream of a world without poverty
• Chapter 3 Guzmán de Alfarache and after: The Spanish picaresque novel in the seventeenth century
• Chapter 4 The Spanish female picaresque
• Chapter 5 The baroque picaro: Francisco de Quevedo´s Buscón
• Chapter 6 Cervantes and the picaresque: A question of compatibility
• Chapter 7 The picaresque novel and the rise of the English novel: From Baldwin and Delony to Defoe and Smollett
• Chapter 8 Defoe and the picaresque
• Chapter 9 Picaresque itineraries in the eighteenth-century French novel
• Chapter 10 The picaro as narrator, writer and reader: The novels of Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen
• Chapter 11 Russia: the picaresque repackaged
• Chapter 12 From epic to picaresque: The colonial origins of the Latin American novel
• Chapter 13 The neopicaresque: The picaresque myth in the twentieth-century novel
• Further reading
• Index