Gil Blas
An innkeeper's son leaves Santillane for the university at Salamanca, is robbed by bandits before the first day is out, and spends the next forty years as valet, secretary and favorite to archbishops, actresses and ministers of state. Lesage runs a servant's-eye survey of every rank in a Spain borrowed as cover for Regency France, where flattery is the only reliable currency. It carried the Spanish picaresque into the eighteenth century wholesale — Smollett translated it, Fielding worked from it, and Gogol built on it.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ Lazarillo de Tormes
- ↓ Tom Jones
- ↓ Dead Souls
- ↓ The Pickwick Papers
- ↓ Roderick Random
Attributes
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Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 67% · 15 shared
- 65% · 15 shared
- 63% · 14 shared
- 62% · 13 shared
- 60% · 15 shared
- 59% · 14 shared