| Winner of the 2004 Modern Language Association's
James Russell Lowell Prize
"Giancarlo Maiorino's new book is an important, complex, and suggestive
study that foregrounds the many contexts of the picaresque. . .
. The book will become a standard reference for all students of
picaresque narratives."—Frederick de Armas, University
of Chicago
"Maiorino
successfully shifts the discussion of Renaissance
texts in particular and of literature in general from heroes
of the
upper
or even the middle classes to the 'common people.'
He accomplishes this by returning us to an early form of the
novel and the
prototype
of picaresque fiction, the Lazarillo de Tormes,
taking this early 'novel' as the starting point for
a wide-ranging and
stimulating
discussion of various tropes and images that will lead
toward a greater understanding of the ways in which
aesthetic and socioeconomic
factors figure in literary texts."—James Mandrell,
Brandeis University
Published anonymously in 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes upset
all the strict hierarchies that governed art and society during
the Renaissance. It traces the adventures, not of a nobleman or
ancient hero, but rather of an ordinary man who struggles for survival
in a cruel, corrupt society after growing up under the care of a
blind beggar. Giancarlo Maiorino treats this picaresque narrative
as a prism for exploring econopoetics, a term he uses to
foreground the ways in which literary and economic modes of production
feed off one another. His approach introduces readers to the turbulent
world of common people of Renaissance Spain even as it affords abundant
insights into the historical significance of this literary classic.
Although
literary historians generally connect the rise of the novel
to the needs of the middle classes of England, Maiorino demonstrates
that its deepest roots are in the culture of indigence that
developed
at the peripheries of Renaissance society and challenged—even
parodied—its authoritarian ambitions. Seen in this light, Lazarillo de Tormes emerges as a key text in understanding
the novel's purchase on visions of escape from authority into alternative
modes of existence.
Maiorino grounds his far-reaching arguments in recent theories
of textuality and the practices of everyday life. His book will
be important reading for all those concerned with the Renaissance,
Spanish history and culture, and, more generally, theories of the
novel. |
|
Giancarlo
Maiorino is Rudy Professor of Comparative Literature, Indiana
University, and editor of The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement
(1999). He is the author of numerous books, including The Portrait
of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque (1991)
and Leonardo da Vinci: The Daedalian Mythmaker (1992), both
from Penn State Press. |
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