Picaresque Fiction Today : The Trickster in Contemporary Anglophone and Italian Literature.

Intro -- Picaresque Fiction Today: The Trickster in Contemporary Anglophone and Italian Literature -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: A Journey around the Picaresque Novel -- 1: History through Roguish Eyes -- Foreword -- History and Picaresque Fiction -- Meaning and Significance in Historical Fiction -- The Pícaro and History -- Dual Sign Irony -- 'Historical' Irony -- Deictic Markers of Time and Space -- Polemical Use of the Allocutive Pronoun 'you' -- Metonymy -- Markers of 'being' and 'seeming' -- Otto, Baudolino, Niketas: Three Portraits of the Emperor -- The Death of Two Obsessions -- 2: Alienation and Counter-culture -- Foreword -- The Picaresque Counter-culture -- What Happens at the Boundary? -- The Stranger, der Fremde, l'estraneo -- Mirror Symmetry and Alienation -- Mythological and Metadescriptive Consciousness -- Homonyms/Synonyms -- Circumlocution -- Euphemism -- Synecdoche -- Acting vs Improvising -- Rhetorical Questions -- Odilo's Private Holocaust -- 3: Women on the Edge: Sexuality and Gender Dissent -- Foreword -- Platonic Love and the Pícara -- Cupid, Psyche and Curiosity -- The Constraints of Nature -- Procreation -- Parenthood -- The Constraints of Society -- Demystified Women -- Religion -- Sentimental Love -- Primeval Innocence -- Literature, Ambition and Transcendence in Vendita Galline km 2 -- King Lear's Pasteboard Crown -- 4: Humour and the Muffled Voice of Reason -- Foreword -- Varieties of Humour in the Picaresque -- Irony -- Irony in the Picaresque: Benni and Doyle -- Contradiction -- Self-irony -- Summary -- Satire -- Self-satire -- Parody -- The Enlightened Grin -- The Enlightenment Watershed -- Individualism, Common Good and General Will -- Experience and Causation -- The Question of Happiness -- God's Laughter in Saltatempo -- Concluding Remarks -- Bibliography -- Index.

In Picaresque Fiction Today Luigi Gussago delineates the legacy and further development of the picaresque in a selection of novels by contemporary Italian and Anglophone writers along several thematic and stylistic lines.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.