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Exiled to the margins of society and surviving by his wits in the course of his wanderings, the picaro marks a sharp contrast to the high-born characters on whom previous Spanish literature had focused. In this illuminating book, Peter N. Dunn offers a fresh view of the gamut of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish picaresque fiction.
Analyses three important Latin American novels in an attempt to redefine the nature of the picaresque, especially in regard to the roles of spontaneous play and carnivalesque laughter.
Explores picaresque fiction across ages and cultures, providing a revealing and fresh examination of this literary genre.
The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel presents the development of the modern Spanish novel from 1600 to the present. Drawing on the combined legacies of Don Quijote and the traditions of the picaresque novel, these essays focus on the question of invention and experiment, on what constitutes the singular features of evolving fictional forms. It examines how the novel articulates the relationships between history and fiction, high and popular culture, art and ideology, and gender and society. Contributors highlight the role played by historical events and cultural contexts in the elaboration of the Spanish novel, which often takes a self-conscious stance toward literary tradition. Topics covered include the regional novel, women writers, and film and literature. This companionable survey, which includes a chronology and guide to further reading, conveys a vivid sense of the innovative techniques of the Spanish novel and of the debates surrounding it.
First published in 1977, this book studies the picaresque as a literary genre. It begins by discriminating between the literature of roguery and the picaresque in particular before discussing the origins of the genre in Spain and tracing its development into Europe. The book concludes with a brief description of ‘contemporary’ works which belong to the same tradition. In tracing the itinerary of the picaro in Europe and in America, it attempts to define a ‘myth’ of the picaresque which consists of two phases: the first being the traditional Spanish model of the picaresque and the second comprising of an ‘anti-picaresque’ myth, in which the ‘hero’ or ‘anti-hero’ no longer remains alienated but instead is the figure in which the ‘new’ society is formed.
"Like cartographers after the Treaty of Versailles, contemporary critics of picaresque literature are hard at work redrawing lines and polemicizing boundaries in an attempt to resolve prevailing problems of definition and method. To reevaluate this canon of texts and to address critical issues, a group of internationally renowned scholars gathered in April 1989 for a two-day conference, "The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue's Tale," which was held at the University of Maryland at College Park and sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies in conjunction with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The essays in this volume grew out of this scholarly exchange and map ou...
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes is a Spanish novella, published anonymously because of its anticlerical content. L�zaro is a boy of humble origins from Salamanca. After his stepfather is accused of thievery, his mother asks a wily blind beggar to take on Lazarillo (little L�zaro) as his apprentice. L�zaro develops his cunning while serving the blind beggar and several other masters, while also learning to take on his father's practice.Besides its importance in the Spanish literature of the Golden Age, Lazarillo de Tormes is credited with founding a literary genre, the picaresque novel, from the Spanish word p�caro, meaning "rogue" or "rascal." In novels of this type, the adventures of the p�caro expose injustice while amusing the reader. Its influence extends to twentieth century novels, dramas and films featuring the "anti-hero".
This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, among them convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner's analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical...
In this book on the relationship between pícaro and cortesano, Felipe E. Ruan argues that these two cultural figures are linked by a shared form of deportment centered on prudent self-accommodation. This behavior is generated and governed by a courtly ethos or habitus that emerges as the result of the growth and influence of the court in Madrid. Ruan posits that both pícaro and cortesano, and their respective books, conduct manual and picaresque narrative, tacitly engage questions of identity and individualism by highlighting the valued resources or forms of capital that come to fashion and sustain self-identity. He places the books of the pícaro and cortesano within the larger polemic of early modern identity and individualism, and offers an account of the individual as agent whose actions are grounded on objective social relations, without those actions being simply the result of mechanistic adherence to the social order.
"This is the first graphic novel adaptation of Lazarillo de Tormes, an anonymous sixteenth-century work that is credited with founding the literary genre of the picaresque novel. This genre includes not only works by Spanish authors like Miguel de Cervantes but also famous novels in English and American literature featuring the "anti-hero." This edition offers a new approach to old questions about a book that has puzzled readers and critics alike for centuries. Who was its mysterious author? Why did the Inquisition forbid this seemingly harmless book? Who read the book and how was it understood? These and other questions are recreated in the graphic novel, offering a broader vision of the fortunes and adversities that this book "lived" and how against all odds it became a literary classic. Translated and retold for the modern reader, Lazarillo de Tormes offers a complete visual experience of the adventures and misadventures of the ultimate picaresque anti-hero as well as insights into the history of the book that set a precedent in Spanish literature."--