"Picaresque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the dramatic potentialities in prose fiction were, however, unusual. The romances were modelled on the epic (Fielding, in fact, describes Joseph Andrews in his Preface as a 'comic Romance'); and the picaresque mode in which Smollett wrote had no obviously dramatic qualities. Richardson's advocacy of the novel in which action is presented rather than retailed seems, indeed, curiously modern: it is something Henry James would certainly ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... telling of the story. Before him hardly any story had been told well; even if it had been plain and clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had lacked the emphasis, the light and shade of skilful grouping. On the "picaresque" (so the autobiographical form was called abroad) convention of a journey he grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of the ancient epic. It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose. Not only did it make it easy for ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... in outcasts is anything new in Spanish literature. Spain is the home of that type of novel which the pigeonhole-makers have named picaresque. These loafers and wanderers of Baroja's, like his artists and grotesque dreamers and fanatics, all are the descendants of the people in the Quijote and the Novelas Ejemplares, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... Boccaccio, Chaucer. The drama of England and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Painting and sculpture from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. The classical mind, and the principle of good taste and common sense. The realism of Defoe and Hogarth, and the Spanish Picaresque novel. Sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. The poetry and painting of nature. The great revolution and the romantic movement. Great literature and art are not ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various |
