Rogues and Genres: Generic Transformation in the Spanish Picaresque and Arabic Maqama
by Douglas C. Young

Conceptions of genre are integral to the understanding of any literature—Western or non-Western.  This book examines the function of generic hybridity and intertextuality in the Spanish picaresque, through a cross-cultural comparison with its Arabic counterpart, the maqama.  Canon formation, a process closely related to questions of genre, is also engaged in detail throughout the study.  The interplay between genre and canon formation is the determining factor for the book’s including an analysis of both canonical and less canonical works. The Guzmán de Alfarache, a novel emblematic of the picaresque’s fullest development, is studied together with two of the genre’s lesser-known representatives, the proto-picaresque Lozana andaluza and the Vida de Marcos de Obregón.  The book demonstrates how the generic hybridity and intertextuality used for subversive effect in the early picaresque, would later become mere conventions in the genre’s epigones.
    An analogous evolution is also apparent in the Arabic maqama, a genre that is a close parallel to the Spanish picaresque in content, if not form.  The book traces the development of the maqama from its antecedent genres, with special attention devoted to rhymed prose and its relationship with quranic discourse. A chapter is devoted to the best-known eastern maqama writers, Hamadhani and Hariri, and their impact on their successor in the Iberian Peninsula, Saraqusti.   It was the collections of maqamat by these authors, all of whom predated by centuries even the earliest Spanish picaresque works, that led some modern scholars to postulate a genetic (although unfortunately undocumentable) relationship between the maqama and picaresque.

ISBN 1-58871-044-0, 126 pp, (PB). $16.95