Sieber - The Picaresque

Para Antonio Recio Gago,
pcaro de Crdoba y
camarero de don Bigote

The volumes composing the Critical Idiom deal with a wide variety of key terms in our critical vocabulary. The purpose of the series differs from that served by the standard glossaries of literary terms. Many terms are adequately defined for the needs of students by the brief entries in these glossaries, and such terms do not call for attention in the present series. But there are other terms which cannot be made familiar by means of compact definitions. Students need to grow accustomed to them through simple and straightforward but reasonably full discussions. The main purpose of this series is to provide such discussions.

Many critics have borrowed methods and criteria from currently influential bodies of knowledge or belief that have developed without particular reference to literature. In our own century, some of them have drawn on art-history, psychology, or sociology. Others, strong in a comprehensive faith, have looked at literature and literary criticism from a Marxist or a Christian or some other sharply defined point of view. The result has been the importation into literary criticism of terms from the vocabularies of these sciences and creeds. Discussions of such bodies of knowledge and belief in their bearing upon literature and literary criticism form a natural extension of the initial aim of the Critical Idiom.

Because of their diversity of subject-matter, the studies in the series vary considerably in structure. But all authors have tried to give as full illustrative quotation as possible, to make reference whenever appropriate to more than one literature, and to write in such a way as to guide readers towards the short-bibliographies in which they have made suggestions for further reading.

John D. Jump

University of Manchester

Picaresque: Belonging or relating to rogues or knaves: applied esp. to a style of literary fiction dealing with the adventures of rogues, chiefly of Spanish origin. OED

The word picaresque seems to have shared the same fate as other literary, critical and descriptive terms such as conceit, irony, satire, naturalism, classicism and romanticism, in that attempts at precise definition have produced more confusion than understanding. The Oxford English Dictionary, while in no sense the ultimate authority, suggests three essential characteristics which help to locate a point of departure. First, the picaresque is a literary phenomenon, a work of fiction which is concerned with the habits and lives of rogues. Secondly, it is a style of fiction, that is, a kind or type of work which is distinguishable from other fictional styles. And third, its origins are found in Spain, implying that it has a history whose genesis can be located in space and time.

Few definitions of the picaresque have improved on the brief description found in the OED. In 1895 Fonger de Haan (An Outline History of the Novela Picaresca in Spain, not published until 1903) defined picaresque fiction as the autobiography of a pcaro, a rogue, and in that form a satire upon the conditions and persons of the time that gives it birth (p. 1). He makes two important additions to the OED account, seeing it as an autobiography and its style as a form of satire, an idea recently taken up and fully explored by Ronald Paulson in The Fictions of Satire, 1967. Soon after de Haan had defended his dissertation at Johns Hopkins, Frank Wadleigh Chandler presented his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University. The first part, The Picaresque Novel in Spain, was published with the title, Romances of Roguery: An Episode in the History of the Novel, 1899. Chandlers book on the picaresque novel is still viewed, particularly by non-Hispanists, as the best authority on the subject. His description of the rogue narrator, the