Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel

This book is about the contemporary picaresque novel. Despite its popularity, the picaresque, unlike the bildungsroman , is still an undertheorized genre, especially for the context of postcolonial literatures. This study considers the picaresque novel’s traditional focus on poverty and deprivation, and argues that its postcolonial versions urge us to conceive of as a more wide-ranging sense of precarity and precariousness. Non-linear biography, episodic style, protean identities, unreliabl