Picaresque and Rogue Fiction

This chapter studies picaresque and rogue fiction. Though produced in vast quantities, and always entertaining, rogue fiction has rarely been more than a sideshow in serious histories of the novel. At most, fiction scholars acknowledged old stories of thieves and con artists as early attempts at realism. Recent interest in poverty, the justice system, prostitution, and criminal subcultures has led scholars to troves of such texts, but hundreds more have no modern readers. Two categories remain especially neglected: translated rogue literature, so long sidelined by the requirements of national literary history; and the general category of seventeenth-century fiction. Hence this chapter focuses on the two monstrous and forgotten bestsellers of these years, James Mabbe's translation of Guzmán de Alfarache (1622) and Richard Head and Francis Kirkman's The English Rogue (1665–71).