SOURCE: Reed, Walter L. “The Advent of the Spanish Picaresque.” In An Exemplary History of the Novel: the Quixotic Versus the Picaresque, pp. 43-70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

In this essay, Reed discusses the development of the picaresque as an aspect of the development of the novel.

He has chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order.

1 Corinthians 1:28

Lazarillo de Tormes, published in three separate editions in 1554, appeared just before the onset of the Counter Reformation in Spain, and it shows some distinctive features as a picaresque novel. Most notably, it is closer to the spirit of humanistic satire, with its critique of ecclesiastical abuse, than the later Spanish novels were to be. Scholars have frequently suggested that the author of the anonymous Lazarillo was a Spanish follower of Erasmus. Although this hypothesis has been discredited,¹ one can see a number of structural...