ABSTRACT
T he picaresque has very precise cultural and historical roots, but it has mutated into a number of different literary forms during the past 400 years. In its original mode as a Spanish narrative of roguery, the picaresque follows the adventures of the picaro, whose inclinations toward wayward living and moral proclivity position him in opposition to qualities of virtue and decency. A study of the genesis of the picaresque provides a way of understanding the transition between 16th-century pastoral romances and the development of the European novel in the 18th century. Written within and set against the backdrop of a society in transition from fixed feudal relationships to a more flexible social structure in which the middle classes began to have significant economic and moral influence, the picaresque foreshadows the novel, charting the rise of bourgeois individualism in its exploration of the tensions between oppressive societies and disaffected individuals. Since emerging as a distinct form of Spanish antipastoral narrative in the late 16th century, the picaresque has undergone a series of cultural, geographical, and historical displacements, from a dominant form of 18th-century narrative in England to a series of modernist reactions to the 19th-century European realist novel and, later, to forms of postmodern narrative that contribute to the structure and tone of much American postfrontier writing and postcolonial stories of cultural dislocation in the 20th century.
