In other words, if I was going to be a picaro I should also be a kitchenhelper, a brothel servant, a slaughterhouse boy, or a baggage carrier, which was a way of covering up for thepicaresque life.
So the picaresque life is more leisurely than the life of kings, emperors, and popes.
Let me tell you what I really think: thepicaresque life is the only life.
The future novelist's schooling was slight and irregular, but as a boy he read much fiction, especially seventeenth and eighteenth century authors, whose influence is apparent in thepicaresque lack of structure of his own works.
Robinson Crusoe,' are picaresquein being mere successions of adventures without artistic plot.
Fielding's influence shows also in the free-and-easy picaresque structure of his plots; though this results also in part from his desultory method of composition.
Moreover, Dickens often follows the eighteenth-century picaresque habit of tracing the histories of his heroes from birth to marriage.
His structure is that of the rambling picaresque story of adventure, not lacking, in his case, in definite progress toward a clearly-designed end, but admitting many digressions and many really irrelevant elements.
Defoe's fictions, picaresquetales of adventure, come still closer, but lack the deeper artistic and moral purpose and treatment suggested a moment ago.
Of the succeeding realists the most important is Tobias Smollett, a Scottish ex-physician of violent and brutal nature, who began to produce his picaresque stories of adventure during the lifetime of Fielding.
In this coarse realism they are picaresque (above, p.
For ten years Thackeray's production was mainly in the line of satirical humorous and picaresque fiction, none of it of the first rank.
After the Tales of Chivalry came the Novelas de Picaros, picaresque novels we have called these Tales of Roguery in English.
In popular literature the Tales of Chivalry, the Picaresque romances or tales of roguery and the almost endless {xlii} number of Italian novels show how wide must have been the popular reading of the time.
The picaresque novels were rather naturalistic studies from low life.
In Spain St. Teresa and the great mystical writers were compensating for the triviality and worse of the picaresque romances and the tales of chivalry.
Less superficial is the influence of Cervantes and his successors of the Picaresque school, down to the last and most representative of them in England, namely Defoe and Smollett.
Cervantes, starving, but straight; he deals us some hard knocks in that second part of his Quixote; then there were some of the writers of the picaresque novels.
Borrow has not of set purpose adopted the picaresque form: search his pages where you will, you will find not a trace of such an intention.
Guzman de Alfarache Mateo Aleman, the author of the great Picaresque romance of Guzman de Alfarache, was a native of Seville.
In the first place he had the faculty for seizing upon the picturesque and picaresque elements in the world about him.
III Mention has been made of Borrow's feeling for the picaresqueelements in life.
Indeed it was this sympathy with the picaresque side of life, this thorough understanding of the gypsy temperament, that gives Borrow's genius its unique distinction.
In his characterization he is at his best--like Scott and Borrow--when dealing with the picaresque elements in life.
Without any particular ability, he models his novels on Don Quixote, and the result is simply a series of coarse adventures which are characteristic of the picaresque novel of his age.
The picaresque novels do not deal with love, but with intrigues for material gain in the widest sense.
There were in Germany popular tales which were picaresque novels in embryo.
A variety of the picaresquespecies was the "books of beggars.
It is not by any means the fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is the only or the chief form of fiction which prescribes or admits these episodic excursions.
That there are resemblances to Scarron, to Le Sage, and to other practitioners of the Picaresque novel is certain; and it was inevitable that there should be.
You might have written a picaresquenovel or a picaresque short story, anyway.
Kingsley was nearly as practical a sportsman as Surtees: but Surtees's characters and manners have the old artificial-picaresque quality only.
Now thepicaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary life: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster to bring the novel thereto.
The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he did well to close it.
It is quite openly a picaresque novel: and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but from Sorel's Francion, which had appeared in France some forty years before.
The tone of the Spanish and French picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in this English example.
As far as mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he should.
This is, to a great extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style.
The picaresque novels of Spain were thought well worthy of translation; but it occurred to no one, or no one had the gift of genius, to shift the scene, and imitate their delineation of native manners.
In the picaresque style, the life of Tacaño is tolerably amusing; but Quevedo, like others, has long since been surpassed.
But it was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a Spanish picaresque novel.
One of the 'picaresque or rogue' novels, of which 'Jack Wilton' by Nash was the first example in English.
In England the effect of the picaresque novel first appears in the 'Jack Wilton' of Nash.
His fame rests secure, despite the unfounded attribution to him of the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes.
Quevedo played an important part in the public life of his time, but is famous mainly for his picaresque novel, El gran tacaño, and for his mordant satirical poems.
English and German writers continued to translate or avail themselves of the works of Cervantes and the picaresque novels, while the Gil Blas of the Frenchman Lesage was a clear-cut, if brilliant, imitation of Spanish models.
The true Spanish novel was to develop out of the picaresque type, which looked back to the popular La Celestina of 1499.
In the works of Nash and his imitators, the different parts are badly dovetailed; the novelist is incoherent and incomplete; the fault lies in some degree with the picaresque form itself.
Grobianism differs from the picaresque tale by the absence of a story connecting the various scenes, but it resembles it in the opportunity it affords for describing a variety of characters, humours, and places.
Faithful to the picaresque plot, Nash conducts his reader into all societies, from the tavern to the palace, from the haunt of robbers to the papal court, and makes his hero no better than he should be.
Piers, according to the picaresque traditions, had been the servant of many masters; he tells his experience of them in the first person, following also in this the rules of the picaresque tale.
Cecilio was evidently like one of that class of valets who figure so largely in the picaresque romances of Spain.
It was certainly an extraordinary sight; adventurers of all kinds surrounded me, reminding me strongly of the heroes in the old picaresque romances.
However, a sort of picaresque and arrogant bearing about the fellow showed that he was not insensible to his profession, and to the splendor of his military dress.
The realism of Defoe and Hogarth, and the Spanish Picaresque novel.
And yet in the light of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying seriousness and conviction.
He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and picaresque romance.
The author had evidently read his Pigault and adopted that writer's revised picaresque scheme.
The "heroic" succumbs to a similar fate rather fatally, though the heroic element itself comes slightly to the rescue; and even the picaresque by no means escapes.
Nobody can say that the picaresque novelists, whether in their original country or when the fashion had spread, were given to berquinades or fairy-tales.
But they are lightly and pleasantly done; it must be obvious to every one that they are simply invaluable training for a novelist who is to leave the beaten track of picaresque adventure and tackle real ordinary life.
Scarron himself has a good deal of it; in fact there is so much in the Spanish picaresque novel that it could not be absent from the followings thereof.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "picaresque" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
