United States or Aruba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The very acute and lively Spanish critic who signs himself Clarin, and is known personally as Don Leopoldo Alas, says the present Spanish novel has no yesterday, but only a day-before-yesterday. It does not derive from the romantic novel which immediately preceded that: the novel, large or little, as it was with Cervantes, Hurtado de Mendoza, Quevedo, and the masters of picaresque fiction.
We may repeat that the matter is picaresque. The story begins in one place and ends in another place, and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end except a biographical connection. A picaresque novel is only a very eventful biography; but the opening of Bleak House is quite another business altogether. It is admirable in quite another way.
I do not think they had any effect on his own character. He must have acquired experiences which would form abundant material for a picaresque novel of modern Paris, but he remained aloof, and judging from his conversation there was nothing in those years that had made a particular impression on him. Perhaps when he went to Paris he was too old to fall a victim to the glamour of his environment.
The Picaresque romance by Mateo Aleman Vida y Lechos del picaro Guzman de Alfarache, Part I., 1599; Part II., 1605. It was translated into English by James Mabbe in 1622 as The Rogue; or, The Life of Guzman de Alfarache. Lamb had a copy, which is now in my possession, with Mary Lamb's name in it. London Magazine, January, 1823.
Evan Harrington is generally lighter in tone; and should be taken in connection with the ten years later Harry Richmond as an example of what may be called a sort of new picaresque novel the subjects being exalted from the gutter at least the street gutter to higher stories of the novel house.
And he significantly added musingly " Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities." To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;
Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time it was entirely lost.
He thought what a fool he was to allow a picaresque past to keep him away from such a woman, how easy it would be to go back to the soft luxury of Cissie, to tell her it made no difference; and somehow, just at that moment it seemed not to.
Stevenson and Kipling have proved its immense popularity, with the whole brood of detective stories and the tales of successful rascality we call "picaresque" Our most popular weekly shows the broad appeal of this class of fiction.
As far as mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he should.
Word Of The Day