Renaissance Poverty and Lazarillo's Family: The Birth of the Picaresque Genre

In the history of literature the change from the idealized worlds of the shepherd and the knight to the world of the picaro; from arcadia and chivalry to the desolate urban landscape of misery and hunger; from romance to irony-in fact, the Copernican revolution that produced a new genre-could only have been born of an upheaval that affected men's lives and forced educated writers to see conditions they had so far ignored. This change stemmed from an increased awareness of human misery, which the urban growth of the Renaissance had made highly visible. The genius of the Spanish author of the Lazarillo consists in his having found the literary voice for such a profound transformation of European society. The Lazarillo, of course, did not annihilate the past, but it gave artistic form to the all-pervading crisis that was destroying the basis of the traditional order.