SOURCE: Wicks, Ulrich. “The Picaresque Genre.” In Picaresque Narratives, Picaresque Fictions: A Theory and Research Guide, pp. 3-16. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Wicks outlines the history of the picaresque narrative, and surveys current debates regarding the specific characteristics of the picaresque.

It has become a critical commonplace in generic theory to make an obligatory acknowledgment of vicious circularity before being forced to proceed within it. The frustration of this part of the hermeneutic task is succinctly put by Paul Hernadi (paraphrasing Günther Müller) in Beyond Genre (1972): “How can I define tragedy (or any other genre) before I know on which works to base the definition, yet how can I know on which works to base the definition before I have defined tragedy?” (2). Inside this circle is still another problem, which Alastair Fowler in Kinds of Literature (1982) calls “ineradicable knowledge”: “In order to...