| |
Picaresque literature (from Spanish picaro, ‘rascal’) is named after two anonymous Spanish novels of the 16th century, both dealing with the adventures of the kind of tricksters, living on their wits, who had been a standby of Western stage comedy since Aristophanes and Plautus. In a picaresque novel, adventure is strung on adventure as beads are strung on a necklace. The term picaresque is now applied to any episodic novel with a comic or satiric thrust. Characteristic and outstanding examples of such works include Petronius\' The Satyricon, Rabelais\' Gargantua, Cervantes\' Don Quixote, Henry Fielding\'s Tom Jones, Gogol\'s Dead Souls and Thomas Mann\'s Confessions of Felix Krull. As with many similar categories, picaresque strategies have in the 20th century become merely one part of the writer\'s repertoire, and contribute form and attitude to ‘serious’ work otherwise as diverse as James Joyce\'s Ulysses, Saul Bellow\'s Humboldt\'s Gift, Günter Grass\'s The Flounder and (on another level, perhaps) Tolkien\'s The Lord of the Rings and its countless progeny. KMcL |
|
