picaresque

adj

1. Of or pertaining to adventurers or rogues.

   “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).]”

2. Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero.

   “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.”

noun

1. A picaresque novel.

   “Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas [From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step]; and that step in Spain was taken by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (already dealt with in his higher walk), the originator of the Picaresque, or low rogue's march novels, of which his Lazarillo de Tormes was the type— [...]”

   “[T]he word picaro, which is almost synonymous with rogue, [...] has given a name to a whole series of novels in Spain called "Picaresques," the heroes of which are adventurers.”

   “And we had agreed completely as to the main stream in the history of the novel … as to its passing from Lope da Vega and the Spanish picaresques, by way of [Danie] Defoe and Richardson, to [Denis] Diderot, Stendahl and [Gustave] Flaubert [...]”

   “In picaresques, the protagonist usually acts as narrator to provide coherence and unity to the genre's inherent structural weakness—its episodic plot.”