The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach

Contemporary usage of the term "picaresque" has blunted its usefulness as a literary concept. What once referred to the historically identifiable genre of la novela picaresca in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is now applied whenever something "episodic" tied togeth...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 1974-03, Vol.89 (2), p.240-249
Main Author: Wicks, Ulrich
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
First person narratives
Literary history
Narrative modes
Narratives
Novels
Panoramas
Paradoxes
Picaresque novels
Protagonists
Satire
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Summary:Contemporary usage of the term "picaresque" has blunted its usefulness as a literary concept. What once referred to the historically identifiable genre of la novela picaresca in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature is now applied whenever something "episodic" tied together by an "antihero" needs a label. One way to reconcile these extremes is to approach the problem from the wider perspective of narrative types in general: a modal approach, which can account both for a specific kind of narrative whose exclusive preoccupation is an exploration of the fictional world of the picaresque and for a primitive fictional possibility which may be part of much fiction outside that genre. The modal perspective leads next to generic awareness, which yields the strict attributes of the genre-the "total picaresque fictional situation"-some of which are: (1) dominance of the picaresque mode, (2) panoramic structure, (3) first-person point of view, (4) the picaro figure, (5) the picaro-landscape relationship, (6) a gallery of human types, (7) parody, and (8) certain basic themes and motifs.
ISSN:0030-8129
1938-1530
DOI:10.2307/461446