Wicks has made a number of important contributions to the study of the picaresque. . . . Wicks's book does not attempt to answer all questions posed by the term, but it provides the most comprehensive view to date on the issues in the picaresque debate. The first third of the book deals with a consideration of the picaresque as a genre, the role of the picaresque in literary scholarship, the value of a modal approach, and the nature of picaresque narrative. The difficulties raised in the chapter on the picaresque mode, for example, indicate how this approach, despite its flaws, can illuminate texts and contribute to the critical process. The remainder of the book includes brief but perceptive analyses of more than 60 picaresque works, from Alonso, mozo de muchos amos to the Woody Allen film, Zelig. The metacritical thrust and the extensive bibliography make this a true `theory and research guide.' A must for public and academic libraries. Choice Picaresque fiction, according to Wicks, is neither a historical episode in the development of the novel nor merely a phenomenon in the social and literary history of Spain, although both are important manifestations of this essential narrative form. It is, he contends, universal narrative structure and theme. His book describes and defines picaresque narrative with careful attention paid to its historical development as a genre and its persistent appeal as an archetypal narrative structure. Beginning with a definition and discussion of the basic picaresque narrative structure and theme, Part I considers the origins and development of a specific type of picaresque narrative in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain--the picaresque novel. This is followed by a history of the term and its various interpretations by critics over the years. He then proposes a genre-construct of picaresque narrative, followed by an extensive bibliography of critical works. Part II explores the usefulness of generic awareness in the act of reading by describing sixty specific works of fiction which collectively illustrate the full narrative spectrum of the picaresque mode.

Wicks has made a number of important contributions to the study of the picaresque. . . . Wicks's book does not attempt to answer all questions posed by the term, but it provides the most comprehensive view to date on the issues in the picaresque debate. The first third of the book deals with a consideration of the picaresque as a genre, the role of the picaresque in literary scholarship, the value of a modal approach, and the nature of picaresque narrative. The difficulties raised in the chapter on the picaresque mode, for example, indicate how this approach, despite its flaws, can illuminate texts and contribute to the critical process. The remainder of the book includes brief but perceptive analyses of more than 60 picaresque works, from Alonso, mozo de muchos amos to the Woody Allen film, Zelig. The metacritical thrust and the extensive bibliography make this a true `theory and research guide.' A must for public and academic libraries. Choice Picaresque fiction, according to Wicks, is neither a historical episode in the development of the novel nor merely a phenomenon in the social and literary history of Spain, although both are important manifestations of this essential narrative form. It is, he contends, universal narrative structure and theme. His book describes and defines picaresque narrative with careful attention paid to its historical development as a genre and its persistent appeal as an archetypal narrative structure. Beginning with a definition and discussion of the basic picaresque narrative structure and theme, Part I considers the origins and development of a specific type of picaresque narrative in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain--the picaresque novel. This is followed by a history of the term and its various interpretations by critics over the years. He then proposes a genre-construct of picaresque narrative, followed by an extensive bibliography of critical works. Part II explores the usefulness of generic awareness in the act of reading by describing sixty specific works of fiction which collectively illustrate the full narrative spectrum of the picaresque mode.

"The fictionalized explorers and conquistadors represented in this corpus all identify with certain aspects of Amerindian culture - significantly, those elements that are most distinct from European culture, such as cannibalism and human sacrifice - but also feel the need to distance themselves from these "others" in order to protect their own European cultural identity. In most cases, the conquistadors themselves are represented as outsiders within the enterprise of imperialism, due to ethnic, religious, or sexual differences from the norm. This representation turns the gaze inward toward the "other" within European culture, underscoring the complex origins of Latin American cultures in the violent encounter between the Amerindians and the conquistadors." "By examining these issues, Lopez's Latin American Novels of the Conquest illuminates the ways in which Latin American novelists used their literary imaginations to embody their ambivalence regarding their own transcultural heritage as children of both the colonized and the colonizer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book examines the theories and practices of narrative and drama in England between 1650 and 1700, a period that, in bridging the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, has been comparatively neglected, and on which, at the time of writing, there is a dearth of new approaches. Critical consensus over these two genres has failed to account for its main features and evolution throughout the period in at least two ways. First, most approaches omit the manifold contradictions between the practice and the theory of a genre. Writers were generally aware of working within a tradition of representation which they nevertheless often challenged, even while the theory was being drafted (e.g., by John Dryden). The ideal and the real were in unacknowledged conflict. Second, critical readings of these late Stuart texts have fitted them proactively into a neat evolutionary pattern that reached eighteenth-century genres without detours or disjunctions, or else they have oversimplified the wealth of generic conventions deployed in the period, so that to the present-day reader, for instance, Restoration drama consists only of either city comedies or Dryden's tragedies. A cursory survey of the critical history of seventeenth-century drama and fiction confirms these views. Although the 1970s and 1980s brought about a crop of interesting reassessments of the field, fiction continues to be seen as a genre that emerged in the eighteenth century. Most critics still treat earlier manifestations as marginal or as prenovelistic experiments; and in most instances it is even possible to discern a sexist bias to justify this treatment, as these works were written by women, unlike much of the canonical fiction of the eighteenth century. A revision of the critical foundations hitherto held and a re-evaluation of the works of fiction written in the seventeenth century is therefore in order. This study adopts, as a basic and essential methodological tenet, the need to decenter the analysis of Restoration fiction and drama from the traditional canon, too limited and conservative and featuring works that are not always suitable as paradigmatic instances of the literary production of the period. These studies have thus been based on a larger than usual--if not on a full--corpus of works produced within the period, and have sought to ascertain the role played in the development of each of the genres under consideration by works, topics, or even by authors hitherto somewhat outside mainstream literary criticism. This opens the field of English literature further through the framing of new questions or revising of old ones, as well as to beginning a dialogue, yet again, as to the meanings of these literary works and also to their circulation from their inception up to the present time. In addition, the rare attention given to works by women makes this all the more an important book for collections in English literature of the period.

With characteristic lawlessness and connection to the common man, the figure of the rogue commanded the world of Irish fiction from 1660 to 1790. During this period of development for the Irish novel, this archetypal figure appears over and over again. Early Irish fiction combined the picaresque genre, focusing on a cunning, witty trickster or pícaro, with the escapades of real and notorious criminals. On the one hand, such rogue tales exemplified the English stereotypes of an unruly Ireland, but on the other, they also personified Irish patriotism. Existing between the dual publishing spheres of London and Dublin, the rogue narrative explored the complexities of Anglo-Irish relations. In this volume, Lines investigates why writers during the long eighteenth-century so often turned to the rogue narrative to discuss Ireland. Alongside recognized works of Irish fiction, such as those by William Chaigneau, Richard Head, and Charles Johnston, Lines presents lesser-known and even anonymous popular texts. With consideration for themes of conflict, migration, religion, and gender, Lines offers up a compelling connection between the rogues themselves, marked by persistence and adaptability, and the ever-popular rogue narrative in this early period of Irish writing.

In this volume a team of three dozen international experts presents a fresh picture of literary prose fiction in the Romantic age seen from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. The work treats the appearance of major themes in characteristically Romantic versions, the power of Romantic discourse to reshape imaginative writing, and a series of crucial reactions to the impact of Romanticism on cultural life down to the present, both in Europe and in the New World. Through its combination of chapters on thematic, generic, and discursive features, Romantic Prose Fiction achieves a unique theoretical stance, by considering the opinions of primary Romantics and their successors not as guiding “truths” by which to define the permanent “meaning” of Romanticism, but as data of cultural history that shed important light on an evolving civilization.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series' total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism's own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.

A fresh reading of the Willhelm Meister novels that dismisses the notion of the Bildungsroman to reveal unities between the texts.