Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero
Opening in France just before the Revolution and concluding just after the attack on the Tuileries, Sabatini's novel deftly combines historical romance, picaresque novel and revenge tragedy.
involving clever rogues or adventurers especially as in a type of fiction; "picaresque novels"; "waifs of the picaresque tradition"; "a picaresque hero"
Applied to that class of literature in which the principal personage is the Spanish picaro, meaning a rascal, a knave, a rogue, an adventurer
A picaresque story is one in which a dishonest but likeable person travels around and has lots of exciting experiences. a picaresque story tells the amusing and unlikely adventures of a character who travels to a lot of different places (picaresco, from pícaro )
{s} of or pertaining to scoundrels or rascals; describing adventurers and scoundrels, of the lives of rogues and villains
Early form of the novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the episodic adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish, pícaro). The hero drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in an effort to survive. The genre originated in Spain and had its prototype in Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). It appeared in various European literatures until the mid-18th century, when the growth of the realistic novel led to its decline. Because of the opportunities for satire they present, picaresque elements enriched many later novels, such as Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls (1842), Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull (1954)
picaresque
Расстановка переносов
pi·ca·resque
Произношение
Этимология
() French, from Spanish picaresco, from pícaro (“rogue”).