The origins and history of Hispanophone picaresque writings as cultural offspring of imperialism and capitalism remains a source of lively debate among literary scholars. While nearly everyone agrees that picaresque novels and their deceitful protagonists have always been “protean” and diverse, some scholars hold to a definition of picaresque literature as a genre—a stable category of artistic composition with a similar form, style, and subject matter—with a long line of progeny. For them, the story begins in Spain with La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (1554) and Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604) and eventually spreads from Spain to its colonies and other parts of western Europe. Other scholars reject the idea of a fixed type of picaresque narrative and a canon from which later works derived. They emphasize varying ways of writing the picaresque in different times and places.
In The Picaresque and the Writing...
