Meaning of picaresque | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Of or pertaining to adventurers or rogues.
2. Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero.

Equivalents

Examples

“The blue and white of the Murano background and the frankly picaresque tramp seem to form strange bed-fellows for the supper-party below stairs into which any gentleman's gentleman of the siècle de Dr. [Samuel] Johnson might have walked at any moment. [Describing an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters (1746).]”

“A mere piece of roguery told in the abstract, without the proper picaresque ornaments, its manifold sinuosities and dexterities, has no interest for the reader; it may recommend the executor of it to the administration of a cat-o-nine-tails, or to an honourable post in the gallies: but there is no music in it without the proper accompaniments.”

“Spain became celebrated about the end of this century for her novels in the picaresque style, of which Lazarillo de Tormes is the oldest extant specimen.”

“He [Daniel Defoe] produced an amazing variety of wares: newspapers, magazines, ghost stories, biographies, journals, memoirs, satires, picaresque romances, essays on religion, reform, trade, projects, – in all more than two hundred works.”

“Opening in France just before the Revolution and concluding just after the attack on the Tuileries, [Rafael] Sabatini's novel deftly combines historical romance, picaresque novel and revenge tragedy.”

“The picaresque novel finds its origins in the humanist search for an expansion of the historiographical genre. [...] The protagonist of the picaresque novel is the pícaro, a character of lowly descent who, by passing through a wide array of professions, attempts to rise in social standing.”

CEFR level