SOURCE: Eisenberg, Daniel. “Does the Picaresque Novel Exist?” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1979): 203-19.

In the following essay, presented in 1976, Eisenberg argues that “picaresque” as a literary term is so general as to be meaningless and proposes doing away with the classification.

The concept of the picaresque novel and the definition of this “genre” is a problem concerning which there exists a considerable bibliography;¹ it is also the subject of a bitter personal debate.² According to Fernando Lázaro Carreter, the picaresque novel is “escurridiza” and something which “se resiste enérgicamente a ser definida.”³ Claudio Guillén entitled a paper “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,”⁴ implying that a definition is a goal which we can perhaps reach at some time in the future; a recent dissertation bears the ambitious title “Hacia una evaluación exacta de lo que se entiende por literatura picaresca.”⁵ Samuel Gili Gaya tells...