picaresque novel summary

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picaresque novel, Early form of the novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the episodic adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish, pícaro). The hero drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in an effort to survive. The genre originated in Spain and had its prototype in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). It appeared in various European literatures until the mid-18th century, when the growth of the realistic novel led to its decline. Because of the opportunities for satire they present, picaresque elements enriched many later novels, such as Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull (1954).

Thomas Nashe Summary

Thomas Nashe was a pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and author of The Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke Wilton (1594), the first picaresque novel in English. Nashe was educated at the University of Cambridge, and about 1588 he went to London, where he became associated with Robert Greene

Gaius Petronius Arbiter Summary

Gaius Petronius Arbiter was the reputed author of the Satyricon, a literary portrait of Roman society of the 1st century ad. The most complete and the most authentic account of Petronius’ life appears in Tacitus’ Annals, an account that may be supplemented, with caution, from other sources. It is

Smollett, detail of an oil painting by an unknown artist, about 1770; in the National Portrait Gallery, London

Tobias Smollett Summary

Tobias Smollett was a Scottish satirical novelist, best known for his picaresque novels The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and his epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). Smollett came of a family of lawyers and soldiers, Whig

Daniel Defoe, engraving by M. Van der Gucht, after a portrait by J. Taverner, first half of the 18th century.

Daniel Defoe Summary

Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, known as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719–22) and Moll Flanders (1722). Defoe’s father, James Foe, was a hard-working and fairly prosperous tallow chandler (perhaps also, later, a butcher), of Flemish descent. By his middle 30s,