Picaresque short story from the 17th century

Abstract

With the appearance of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares (1613), the short novel not only established itself among the literary genres of the time, but also introduced a new typology into the genre: the picaresque short novel. Obviously, just as Cervantes' picaresque novels ("La ilustre fregona", "Rinconete y Cortadillo" and "El coloquio de los perros") did not respect the picaresque canon established by Lazarillo and Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, neither did the picaresque short novels, each of them following a different path but with the same goal: the imitation of Cervantes' model, above all, but not only, through the introduction of picaresque themes, plots and characters, but declined with Cervantes' modality. This paper attempts, with the provisionality caused by the lack of critical coordinates in this respect, to stipulate a corpus of these works and, at the same time, to issue a hypothetical poetics of the genre "novela corta".