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 unreliable narratives and abject landscapes are the social and formal
aspects through which this precarity is thematized and performed. A concise analysis of these
concepts and phenomena in the picaresque provides the structure for this book. What is
especially significant in comparison to other forms of postcolonial (post)modernism is that the
picaresque does not offer a general critique of a project of modernity but through its
persistent precarity points to the paradoxical logics of capitalism which are especially
nuanced under the conditions of neo-imperialism and neoliberalism. The book features texts by
established postcolonial authors such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul but especially
focuses on the more recent proliferation of the genre in works by Aravind Adiga Mohsin Hamid
and Indra Sinha.
