“El cuento de cuentos:” Quevedo's Anticipation of a Genre

Shorter fictional genres were by no means well distinguished in post‐Renaissance preceptive writings. The Cuento de cuentos (1626) of Quevedo, reduced to its elements of plot, can never‐theless be adequately marked off from the facetia , the literary anecdote and the novella. Experimentally one might examine this story as a foreshadowing of the largely nineteenth‐century genre of the Humoresque, with its avoidance of the didactic and the satirical, and with its directionless layout. This may not even be the only text which allows of this tenta‐tive classification. Perhaps Cervantes's Rinconete y Cortadillo and episodes of Quevedo's own Vida del buscón (also issued in 1626), about which discussion is so acrimonious at this moment, might find their places here. It would be gratifying to pursue the thought that Quevedo's little work contains the germ of a fictionally vital genre in years to come.