"Picaresque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of "The Island Pharisees" was buried in a drawer; when retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person. These two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's dictum that its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin; and, struggling heavily with laziness and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Lodge's romantic story of Rosalynde, which was used by Shakespeare in As You Like It. This was modeled upon the Italian novella, or short story, which became very popular in England during the Elizabethan Age. In the same age we have introduced into England the Spanish picaresque novel (from picaro, a knave or rascal), which at first was a kind of burlesque on the mediaeval romance, and which took for its hero some low scoundrel or outcast, instead of a knight, and followed him through ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... too strong to be heard other than as a strange noise by those near to him. It may be urged that The Bible in Spain disproves these conclusions; but The Bible in Spain was a peculiar book. It was a chronicle of Christian enterprise served up with sauce picaresque. It pleased and astonished everyone, especially those who had grown a little weary of godly missioners. It had the advantage of being spontaneous, having been largely written on the spot, whereas Lavengro and The Romany Rye were worked on and laboured at for years. Above all, it had the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... is not so thick as the other by any means, but it is a sturdy bough for all that. Stevenson and Kipling have proved its immense popularity, with the whole brood of detective stories and the tales of successful rascality we call "picaresque" Our most popular weekly shows the broad appeal of this ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... LITERATURE. The vagrant heroes of Petronius are the originals from whom directly, or indirectly, later authors drew that inspiration which resulted in the great mass of picaresque fiction; but, great as this is, it is not to this that the Satyricon owes its powerful influence upon the literature of the world. It is to the author's recognition of the importance of environment, of the vital role of inanimate ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... have been starved to death, or have lost the power of recovery and rebound, if my captor, by some freak not yet perfectly accounted for, had not gratuitously opened a little window in it and added a powerful telescope. The daring chapters of Michael Scott's picaresque romance of the tropics were that telescope ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... such facts do fall away from a traveller walking fast. We are more likely perhaps, to pass by Mr. Creakle's school than to pass by Mrs. Jarley's wax-works. The only point is that we should pass by both of them. Up to this point in Dickens's development, his novel, however true, is still picaresque; his hero never really rests anywhere in the story. No one seems really to know where Mr. Pickwick lived. Here he ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton |
