Origins and definition of the picaresque genre

Over the past century, the term picaresque has been fully incorporated into the metalanguage of Western national literatures: picaresque novel in English, novela picaresca in Spanish, roman picaresque in French, Schelmenroman or pikarescher Roman in German, Плутовско́й рома́н in Russian, romanzo picaresco in Italian, pikaresk-roman in Danish and Norwegian, and pikareskroman in Swedish. Novels from different periods and from disparate nations have been designated as picaresque, from the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1550–2?) to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), and from Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) to Sokolov’s Palinsandriia (1985). Those many novels labelled picaresque retain some of the quintessential features of the early examples of this sort of text published more than 400 years ago, and bear testimony to their great influence on and contribution to the history of Western literatures. In the 1960s and 70s, the picaresque genre enjoyed enhanced esteem among critics who examined the picaresque elements in the works of some of their nations’ greatest writers. These included, for example, Fielding and Dickens in Britain, Twain and Bellow in the United States, Lesage and Voltaire in France, Hans Jakob Grimmelshausen, Mann and Grass in Germany, and Ilf and Petrov in Russia. Nowadays, the label picaresque is, generally speaking, deemed a prestigious one: when applied to any post-seventeenth-century novel it confers upon it a halo of critical appeal and relates it to one of the earliest traditions (perhaps the earliest) in the history of the novel. Yet so thin have some critics spread the term that it has often been loosely applied to novels that are, in the strictest sense, conspicuously non-picaresque, such as Don Quixote and Tom Jones. The term ‘picaresque’ remains one of the most overused and contentious in literary criticism for three main reasons. Firstly, in languages without a picaresque narrative tradition of their own the term is used to refer to Spanish picaresque texts, whereas in countries where picaresque novels were written, it has become a key concept in the history of their