The picaresque, translation, and the history of the novel (original) (raw)
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Spanish Speculations on the Rise of the English Novel: The Romantic, the Picaresque and the Quixotic
Comparative Critical Studies, 2015
Few books have had such a pervasive and permanent influence on any field of English studies as Ian Watt's 1957 monograph The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Apart from coining the universally accepted phrase to designate the appearance of that new form of prose narrative in eighteenth-century Britain, Watt made current an explanation of it which soon became the explanation. This was based on a combination of literary, socio-economic and ideological reasons: the spread of formal realism, anchored in philosophical empiricism and formal because it 'does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it' 1 ; the expansion of the reading market, as a result of wider and easier access to books; and the emergence of middle-class individualism, the conjunction of capitalism and Protestantism giving shape to the bourgeois ethos. According to Watt, the novel provided a realistic representation of modern experience catering for an enlarged, mainly middle-class reading public and promoting their worldview; in other words, the novel gave expression to the modernity that made it possible by changes in epistemology, material conditions and ideology. In so doing, Watt combined a formalist or intrinsic and a materialistic or extrinsic approach to present the rise of the novel as an exclusively British affair, dismissing any foreign influences or intervention. As a matter of fact, he excluded those who he may have felt were the most serious contenders to the claim of priority in what we could call the race for the rise because they did not fit into his prescription of formal realism or into his alignment of the new genre with modernity: Cervantes and the 49
Novels, Newspapers and Nation: The Beginnings of Serial Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
2009
S erial novels constitute the majority of narrative fiction written in Mexico from the 1840s to the 1870s. While in literary histories these novels are often relegated to a category of inferior literature, I argue that these texts functioned as important instruments for the construction and dissemination of national models, and thus served as a fundamental tool in the early phases of the nation-building process in Mexico. 1 In this chapter, I explore the circumstances surrounding the appearance of the first serial novels in Mexico, as written by Justo Sierra O'Reilly and Manuel Payno, in order to begin to establish the similarities and differences between this occurrence in Latin America and Europe. 2 In this transmission of cultural codes, the concepts of nation and novel were intertwined in a relation of near-symbiosis: by the second half of the nineteenth century, "civilized" nations were supposed to produce novels as an increasingly important component of national expression, while novels had their own crucial role to play in the creation of nations.
Unpublished typescript, 2010
El estudio emplea y adapta el concepto de “campo de producción literaria” de Pierre Bourdieu como noción organizadora para abordar una serie de preguntas sobre el éxito editorial del Guzmán de Alfarache y su importante papel en la formación temprana del ‘genero’ picaresco. Entre los interrogantes que se pretenden responder figuran cuestiones como, ¿a qué puede atribuirse el gran éxito del Guzmán de Alfarache? ¿Fue su éxito el resultado de cambios importantes en el campo de producción literaria? ¿Cuál es la relación de ese éxito y la formación temprana del ‘género’ picaresco? ¿Cuáles son los conflictos entre la intención autorial y la recepción lectora del Guzmán y cómo influyeron esas tensiones en las definiciones coetáneas de la ‘especie’ picaresca?
ON THE SUBJECT OF FICTION ISLANDS AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOVEL
diacritics, special issue Robert A. Davidson and Joan Ramon Resina, eds., New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories, 2003
Realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket.-William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Bearings Drifting among the topoi the Middle Ages inherited from classical culture, islands held on to many of their characteristics throughout this long period and simultaneously nurtured new paradigms, which led to multiple and profound transformations of the motif in early modern imaginaries. In the medieval period the island serves simply as a setting , as a site for the articulation of fiction and reality, to which many texts from different traditions can attest, from philosophical debates to romances to clerical works, from northern Europe to the south of the Iberian peninsula. It is in the literature of late medieval Iberia, precisely, that a major shift in the use of insular geographies can be documented, one that bore profound consequences for the development of genres and, especially, for the consideration of fiction itself. When we reach the Renaissance, there occurs a discursive separation between fiction and reality. The shift to a clearer separation is conveyed in both Renaissance cartography and narrative in the form of the island as an ideal metaphor for such distancing. This shift has a major structural implication for the construction of new genres. By separating fiction from reality, the literary solutions that come forth give rise to the modern novel, of which Don Quijote (1605, 1615) is considered to be the first. In cartography, the result is the emergence of the atlas. 1 The use of the island is pervasive in the book of chivalry and is directly borrowed from this genre in Don Quijote. Through a process of metaphorization, the use of the island as a structure in Don Quijote is one of the traits marking the difference between the book of chivalry and the novel. 2 The distance established by the relocation of marvelous contents to an island and the metaphoric use of the motif in the modern novel reveal the configuration of a new concept of fiction. In fact, Spanish Golden Age literary theories elaborated the separation of fiction and reality in great detail, and the book of chivalry, with its insistent use of the insular, became exemplary of what was then to be perceived, now in clearly neg-1. See Lestringant. While he does not discuss libros de caballerías or the novel along with the atlas, his documentation and numerous insights on spatial articulations in (particularly French) literature and in the movement from isolario to atlas are relevant here. 2. I fully document and develop these ideas in my doctoral dissertation [see Pinet]. For an extensive documentation, especially in cartography and in French literature, see Lestringantʼs reflections on the enterprise of discovery and colonization of the Americas, as well as his writings on Rabelais, of special interest to my analysis here. diacritics 33.
Examples, Samples, Signs: An Artifactual View of Fictionality in the French Novel, 1681–1830
Historians of the novel typically use examples — a few mostly canonical works — to establish their desired narrative. The problem is that these chosen novels function less as true examples — representatives of a class of objects — than as signs of the invisible process (conceptual or socio-subjective) that is the coming of Modernity. This study approaches the novel’s history, and specifically the oft-debated question of its developing fictionality, by using samples of French novels from 1601 to 1830. This quantitative approach reveals that though the novel can indeed be said to “fictionalize” over the course of the eighteenth century, the customary explanations for the evolution are not supported by the record. I propose of that the novel is not one thing that modernizes, but in fact an ever-changing system of artifacts that should be understood through models provided by studies of technological innovation. Novelistic artifacts are invented, they evolve and spread, and they eventually fall into disuse, all in accordance with the values of their human inventors, and the constraints placed on the latter by the extant artifacts available for modification.