Description
Book SynopsisMaiorino treats this picaresque narrative as a prism for exploring econopoetics, a term he uses to foreground the ways in which literary and economic modes of production feed off one another. His approach introduces readers to the world of common people of Renaissance Spain even as it affords abundant insights into the significance of this classic.
Trade Review“This scholarship is clear, concise, pithy, and powerful.”
—Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance
“Giancarlo Maiorino's new book is an important, complex, and suggestive study that foregrounds the many contexts of the picaresque. . . . The book will become a standard reference for all students of picaresque narratives.”
—Frederick de Armas,University of Chicago
“Maiorino successfully shifts the discussion of Renaissance texts in particular and of literature in general from heroes of the upper or even the middle classes to the ‘common people.’ He accomplishes this by returning us to an early form of the novel and the prototype of picaresque fiction, the Lazarillo de Tormes, taking this early ‘novel’ as the starting point for a wide-ranging and stimulating discussion of various tropes and images that will lead toward a greater understanding of the ways in which aesthetic and socioeconomic factors figure in literary texts.”
—James Mandrell,Brandeis University
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Part I In the Belly of Indigence
1. Econopoetics and the Great Chain of Handouts
Part II Starved to Death
2. The Mousetrap: The Price of Staying Alive
3. Inconspicuous Consumption: Of Toothpicks and Leftovers
Part III Out of Laceria
4. The Water Carrier: From Subsistence to Prosperity
5. The Economic Culture of Toledan Provecho
Part IV The Price of Onomastics
6. Lázaro de Tormes: What’s in a Name?
7. Will Lazarus Ever Be a Wage Earner?
Part V Dividends of the Mind
8. The Cost of Education: A Tale of Two Cities
9. The Economy of Genre
10 At the Margins: Whose Renaissance?
Works Cited
Index of Names
Index
