In Road-Book America, Rowland A. Sherrill explores how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of recent American texts, both fiction and nonfiction. Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, travelling characters common to old and new versions of the genre, Road-Book America is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of the "new American picaresque", exemplified by William Least HeatMoon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, and hundreds of other narratives published in the past four decades. Open, resilient, adaptable, and perennially hopeful, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self and lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal.

This book studies picaresque narratives from 1690 to 2013, examining how this literary form serves as a reflection on the material conditions necessary for writing literature in Mexico. In The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico, Jorge Téllez argues that Mexican writers have drawn on the picaresque as a device for pondering what they regard as the perils of intellectual and creative labor. Surveying ten narratives from 1690 to 2013, Téllez shows how, by and large, all of them are iterations of the same basic structure: pícaro meets writer; picaro tells life story; writer eagerly writes it down. This written mediation (sometimes fictional but other times completely factual) is presented as part of a transaction in which it is rarely clear who is exploiting whom. Highlighting this ambiguity, Téllez's study brings into focus the role that the picaresque has played in the presentation of writers as disenfranchised and vulnerable subjects. But as Téllez demonstrates, these narratives embody a discourse of precarity that goes beyond pícaros, and applies to all subjects who engage in the production and circulation of literature. In this way, Téllez shows that the literary form of the picaresque is, above all, a reflection on the value of literature, as well as on the place and role of writing in Mexican society more broadly. The Picaresque and the Writing Life in Mexico is a unique work that suggests new paths for studying the reiteration of literary forms across centuries. Looking at the picaresque in particular, Téllez offers a new interpretation of this genre within its national context and suggests ways in which this genre remains relevant for reflecting on literature in contemporary society. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American studies, Mexican cultures and literatures, and comparative literature.

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.

"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 out an unusually broad landscape of contemporary critical concern." "The volume opens with an essay by Marina S. Brownlee, which addresses whether there is an "essential feature, configuration, or environment that determines the presence of a picaresque text." In his study of classicity in the Spanish Golden Age, Joseph V. Ricapito examines the Perez translation of the Odyssey and its link with the Spanish picaresque genre. Bruno M. Damiani's essay focuses on Lozana Andaluza as an important link between Celestina and the Lazarillo and investigates traits common in the later novel of roguery. "The Picaresque and Autobiography" by Randolph D. Pope examines the split vision of autobiography in Golden Age picaresque. Calhoun Winton looks into the rise of the picaresque novel in seventeenth-century London printing and publishing practice. Studying pamphlets, chapbooks, and periodicals, he poses the question: By whom were these examples of the picaresque mode written, for what reward, and with what audience in mind? Jerry C. Beasley's "Translation and Cultural Translatio" addresses questions of the translation of picaresque texts and the impact of this genre on novelistic discourse throughout Europe. In his essay Gerald Gillespie contextualizes Grimmelshausen's The Adventurous German Simplicissimus in French comic and satiric and Spanish disillusionistic modes. Nancy Vogeley examines Lizardi's Don Catrin de la Fechenda in the context of the Enlightenment and redefinition and politicization of the concepts of vice and virtue and discusses how these changing thought patterns facilitated the task of American writers who were then rethinking their political and moral landscape. Jerome Christensen's essay on Lord Byron investigates with primary and secondary textual sources the meaning of picaresque in Don Juan, establishes the vitality of the genre in this work, and looks into the distinction made between tuum and meum. The closing essay, Mario M. Gonzalez's "The Brazilian Picaresque," presents an overview of the genre in Brazilian literature." "This volume represents the diversity of scholarly approaches to the study of picaresque and opens up new questions concerning the picaresque canon, especially regarding its criteria for the definition of parameters that include elements from classical antiquity to contemporary theory."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This critical interpretation of the origins of modern fiction follows the transformation of the picaresque novel over four centuries through the literature of Spain, France, England, Germany, Russia, and the United States. Blackburn uses for the first time the resources of myth criticism to demonstrate how the picaresque masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age founded a narrative structure that was continued by Defoe, Smollett, Melville, Twain, and Mann. Originally published in 1979. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

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.