This study looks back at the picaresque, with its Spanish roots, and especially with its tradition in English literature; then, it comes to contemporary times, and identifies elements of the picaresque in contemporary novels. The main thesis of the author is that the picaresque has never left the literary scene in Britain, being an aesthetic invariant, which expresses a natural inclination of the British authors towards the picaresque story. Postcolonial authors also favour this genre as a consequence of their own literary tradition, which includes particular variants of the picaresque, and as a result of their own situation as immigrant/displaced authors, which gives them material for stories of displaced characters – rogues. The study rigorously identifies the sources of the contemporary protocols of the picaresque, as well as a few variants of picaresque stories in a selection of novels the author accounts for theoretically.

Since the sixteenth century, Western literature has produced picaresque novels penned by authors across Europe, from Alemán, Cervantes, Lesage and Defoe to Cela and Mann. Contemporary authors of neopicaresque are renewing this traditional form to express twenty-first-century concerns. Notwithstanding its major contribution to literary history, as one of the founding forms of the modern novel, the picaresque remains a controversial literary category, and its definition is still much contested. The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature examines the development of the picaresque, chronologically and geographically, from its origins in sixteenth-century Spain to the neopicaresque in Europe and the United States.

1. Literary Terms 2. Earlier Trends in Fiction 3. Trends in 20th and 21st Century Fiction British Fiction 4. Charles Dickens : A Tale of Two Cities 5. Jane Austen : Pride and Prejudice American Fiction 6. Harper Lee : To Kill a Mockingbird 7. Ernest Hemingway : The Old Man and the Sea Indian Popular Fiction 8. Arvind Adiga : The White Tiger 9. Sudha Murthy : Dollar Bahu.

This book provides a state-of-the-art account of corporate blogs as a new form of corporate communication studied from corpus-based and discourse perspectives. Using a range of analytical techniques to examine a large corpus of 500 randomly selected corporate blog posts, the book examines how language works in the novel and hybrid context of online communication at different levels of linguistic description, including vocabulary use (keywords), phraseology (lexical bundles), stance expression and the generic structure. The findings are interpreted in functional terms in this book in order to provide an overall characterization of this new and evolving corporate genre.

The orphan has turned out to be an extraordinarily versatile literary figure. By juxtaposing diverse fictional representations of orphans, this volume sheds light on the development of cultural concepts such as childhood, family, the status of parental legacy, individualism, identity and charity. The first chapter argues that the figure of the orphan was suitable for negotiating a remarkable range of cultural anxieties and discourses in novels from the Victorian period. This is followed by a discussion of both the (rare) examples of novels from the first half of the 20th century in which main characters are orphaned at a young age and Anglophone narratives written from the 1980s onward, when the figure of the orphan proliferated once more. The trope of the picaro, the theme of absence and the problem of parental substitutes are among the issues addressed in contemporary orphan narratives. The book also looks at the orphan motif in three popular fantasy series, namely Rowling’s Harry Potter septology, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. It then traces the development of the orphan motif from the end of the 19th century to the present in a range of different types of comics, including funnies and gag-a-day strips, superhero comics, underground comix, and autobiographical comics.

This book comprises a collection of articles devoted to the academic study of popular texts in English. Authors analyse genres which had been habitually looked down on by canonical approaches to literature and art. They take into serious consideration forms like horror literature, the gothic, fantasy, de-tective fiction, science fiction, best-sellers, films and television series of different kinds... among some other representations of what conservative scholars had been considering as marginal. The referential richness of the perspectives reflected here demonstrates that popular texts can be enjoyable for readers and audiences, at the same time that they can be significant in order to reach a better understanding of our culture and ourselves at the beginning of a new millennium.