SOURCE: Guillen, Claudio. “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque.” In Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History, pp. 135-58. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1971.

In the essay below, Guillen reviews the development of the picaresque novel as a model for a theory of genre.

Bibliographical research, of which the works of Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino offer today an eminent example,¹ provides the student of literature with a very substantial problem: that of the relationship between a poem and its readers. As everyone suspects in the most generic way—scripta manent—art can and often does succeed in conquering time. But how does literature, in addition, traverse space? Is one of these dimensions a condition of the other? This is what a certain branch of the sociology of literature, of which Robert Escarpit is the persuasive advocate, attempts to clarify. These studies deal...