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picaresque novel
(redirected from Picaresque literature)

   Also found in: Wikipedia 0.06 sec.

picaresque novel

Early form of the novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the episodic adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish, pícaro). The hero drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in an effort to survive. The genre originated in Spain and had its prototype in Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). It appeared in various European literatures until the mid-18th century, when the growth of the realistic novel led to its decline. Because of the opportunities for satire they present, picaresque elements enriched many later novels, such as Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls (1842), Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull (1954).


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Edwards uses his extensive familiarity with circumstances in Delicado's native Cordoba and with the conventions of Spanish picaresque literature to demonstrate that the work reflects well both the realia and the cultural attitudes of the Iberian conversos environment.
From the times of Lazarillo to the present, picaresque literature with its comic anti-heroes has been the most potent form of cultural, social, and political criticism in the Hispanic world.
All the main themes of American humorous and picaresque literature were represented in the comics of those days--rural naivete, backstreet cunning, small-town warmth.
 
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