SOURCE: Wicks, Ulrich. “The Romance of the Picaresque.” Genre 11, no. 1 (1978): 29-44.

In the essay below, Wicks defends the notion of a picaresque tradition, while acknowledging the difficulty in defining the characteristics of the genre.

I

—Es tan bueno—respondió Ginés—, que mal año para Lazarillo de Tormes y para todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito o escribieren.

—Don Quijote (Part I, Chapter 22)

The awareness of picaresque fiction as a genre begins almost simultaneously with the first (though not universally accepted) prototype, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). In an essay called “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque,” Claudio Guillén has shown that with the publication of the first part of Mateo Alemán's best-selling Guzmán de Alfarache in 1599, a “common género picaresco” came into being. The success of Alemán's book resurrected Lazarillo de Tormes which, after its initial popularity, had...