Author Description

Like cartographers after the Treaty of Versailles, contemporary critics of picaresque literature are hard at work redrawing lines and polemicizing boundaries in an attempt to resolve prevailing problems of definition and method. To reevaluate this canon of texts and to address critical issues, a group of internationally renowned scholars gathered in April 1989 for a two-day conference, "The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue's Tale," which was held at the University of Maryland at College Park and sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies in conjunction with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The essays in this volume grew out of this scholarly exchange and map out an unusually broad landscape of contemporary critical concern. The volume opens with an essay by Marina S. Brownlee, which addresses whether there is an "essential feature, configuration, or environment that determines the presence of a picaresque text." In his study of classicity in the Spanish Golden Age, Joseph V. Ricapito examines the Perez translation of the Odyssey and its link with the Spanish picaresque genre. Bruno M. Damiani's essay focuses on Lozana Andaluza as an important link between Celestina and the Lazarillo and investigates traits common in the later novel of roguery. "The Picaresque and Autobiography" by Randolph D. Pope examines the split vision of autobiography in Golden Age picaresque. Calhoun Winton looks into the rise of the picaresque novel in seventeenth-century London printing and publishing practice. Studying pamphlets, chapbooks, and periodicals, he poses the question: By whom were these examples of the picaresque mode written, for what reward, and with what audience in mind? Jerry C. Beasley's "Translation and Cultural Translatio" addresses questions of the translation of picaresque texts and the impact of this genre on novelistic discourse throughout Europe. In his essay Gerald Gillespie contextualizes Grimmelshausen's The Adventurous German Simplicissimus in French comic and satiric and Spanish disillusionistic modes. Nancy Vogeley examines Lizardi's Don Catrin de la Fechenda in the context of the Enlightenment and redefinition and politicization of the concepts of vice and virtue and discusses how these changing thought patterns facilitated the task of American writers who were then rethinking their political and moral landscape. Jerome Christensen's essay on Lord Byron investigates with primary and secondary textual sources the meaning of picaresque in Don Juan, establishes the vitality of the genre in this work, and looks into the distinction made between tuum and meum. The closing essay, Mario M. Gonzalez's "The Brazilian Picaresque," presents an overview of the genre in Brazilian literature.. This volume represents the diversity of scholarly approaches to the study of picaresque and opens up new questions concerning the picaresque canon, especially regarding its criteria for the definition of parameters that include elements from classical antiquity to contemporary theory.