Description
Book SynopsisIn Picaresque Fiction Today Luigi Gussago examines the development of the picaresque in contemporary Anglophone and Italian fiction. Far from being an extinct narrative form, confined to the pages of its original Spanish sources or their later British imitators, the tale of roguery has been revisited through the centuries from a host of disparate angles. Throughout their wanderings, picaresque antiheroes are dragged into debates on the credibility of historical facts, gender mystifications, rational thinking, or any simplistic definition of the outcast. Referring to a corpus of eight contemporary novels, the author retraces a textual legacy linking the traditional picaresque to its recent descendants, with the main purpose of identifying the way picaresque novels offer a privileged insight into our sceptical times. Cover illustration by Eugene Ivanov "Night Airing", 2007.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: A Journey around the Picaresque Novel Chapter 1 History through Roguish Eyes Foreword History and picaresque fiction Meaning and significance in historical fiction The pícaro and history Dual sign irony ‘Historical’ irony Deictic markers of time and space Polemical use of the allocutive pronoun ‘you’ Metonymy Markers of ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ Otto, Baudolino, Niketas: three portraits of the Emperor The death of two obsessions Chapter 2 Alienation and Counter-Culture Foreword The picaresque counter-culture What happens at the boundary? The stranger, der Fremde, l’estraneo Mirror symmetry and alienation Mythological and metadescriptive consciousness Homonyms/synonyms Circumlocution Euphemism Synecdoche Acting vs improvising Rhetorical questions Odilo’s private holocaust Chapter 3 Women on the Edge: Sexuality and Gender Dissent Foreword Platonic love and the pícara Cupid, Psyche and curiosity The constraints of nature Procreation Parenthood The constraints of society Demystified women Religion Sentimental love Primeval innocence Literature, ambition and transcendence in Vendita galline km 2 King Lear’s pasteboard crown Chapter 4 Humour and the Muffled Voice of Reason Foreword Varieties of humour in the picaresque Irony Irony in the picaresque: Benni and Doyle Contradiction Self-irony Summary Satire Self-satire Parody The enlightened grin The Enlightenment watershed Individualism, common good and general will Experience and causation The question of happiness God’s laughter in Saltatempo Concluding Remarks Bibliography
