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The picaresque novel ( Spanish: "picaresco", from "pícaro", for "rogue" or "rascal") was a popular style of novel that originated in Spain and flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term denotes a subgenre of usually satiric prose fiction and depicts in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society. 1 History
Lazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in Antwerp and Spain in 1554 is variously considered either the first picaresque novel or an antecedent to the genre. The title character Lazarillo is a pícaro who must live by his wits in an impoverished country full of hypocrisy. The first unquestioned picaresque novel was published in 1599: Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, characterized by religiosity. Francisco de Quevedo's El buscón ( 1626) is considered the masterpiece of the subgenre, because of his baroquePeter Paul Rubens: dynamic figures spiral down around a void: draperies blow: a whirl of movement lit in a shaft of light, rendered in a free bravura handling of paint The Baroque was a style in art that used exaggerated motion and abundant detail to prod style and the study of the delinquent psychology.
In other European countries, these Spanish novels were read and imitated.
In GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east, Grimmelshausen wrote Simplicissimus ( 1669Events Samuel Pepys stopped writing his diary. The Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb destroys several Hindu temples and banned the whole religion, so Hindus rebel. Antonio Stradivari makes his first violin Famine in Bengal kills 3 million people The Hanseatic Leagu), the most important of non-Spanish picaresque novels. It describes the devastation caused by the Thirty Years' WarGustavus Adolphus at the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631)The Thirty Years' War was a conflict fought between the years 1618 and 1648, principally in the central European territory of the Holy Roman Empire, but also involving most of the major continental powe. In FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents., this kind of novel declined into an aristocratic adventure: Le Sage's Gil Blas ( 1715Events September 1 King Louis XIV of France dies after a reign of 72 years, leaving the throne of his exhausted and indebted country to his great-grandson Louis XV. Regent for the new, five years old monarch is Philippe d'Orleans, nephew of Louis XIV.). In England, the body of Tobias Smollett's work, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders ( 1722) are considered picaresque, but they lack of the sense of religious redemption of delinquency that was very important in Spanish and German novels. The triumph of Moll Flanders is more economic than moral.
2 Influence on modern fiction
In the English-speaking world, the term "picaresque" has referred more to a literary technique or model than to the precise genre that the Spanish call picaresco. The English-language term can simply refer to an episodic recounting of the adventures of an antihero on the road. Henry Fielding proved his mastery of the form in Joseph Andrews ( 1742), The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great ( 1743) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling ( 1749), but, as Fielding himself wrote, these novels were written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, not in imitation of the picaresque novel.
Other novels with elements of the picaresque include the French Candide, and the later English The Luck of Barry Lyndon.
Some modern novelists have used some techniques of the antique novels, as Gogol in Dead Souls (1842-52). Rudyard Kipling's Kim ( 1901) combined the influence of the picaresque novel with the then new spy novel. Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Svejk ( 1923?) was the first example of the picaresque technique in Central Europe. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was consciously written as a picaresque novel, as were many other novels of vagabond life, such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road ( 1957). Other recent examples are Camilo José Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte" ( 1951), Günter Grass's The Tin Drum ( 1959), Helen Zahavi 's Dirty Weekend ( 1991), "the serial-killer novel to end all serial-killer novels" ( Ian Ousby ) and Stewart Home's Cunt ( 1999).
