New Versions of Roguery

Abstract

This number of Text Matters features papers which explore the changing nature of roguery in literature and film. While the figure of the rogue has earned much literary attention in the past, its present moment is ambiguous, uneasy, even as we live in an age of flagrantly outrageous rogues, so overt that perhaps roguery as a study or a subject is outre because the world is a collection of rogues, and the behavior of rogues is now dramatically public rather than a matter of covert and shameful conduct. Despite this development, rogues still compel attention, curiosity and stories. Note the glut of documentaries, films and books on thieves and criminals, our fascination with those who refuse to follow the rules. And that continuing interest serves as a useful critical measurement and kinesics. Is the figure of the rogue then a historical figure, a cultural construct, a blame magnet or an object of moral suasion? Has it morphed into the trickster, the holy fool, the picaro or the magician? Who is now accorded rogue status, in literature and film? Although rogue literature’s 16thand 17th-century origins are not to be dismissed, the current socio-political circumstances inflecting our evaluation of character have brought to light a new geography of miscreant, a new mapping of what scoundrel-saint can signal. For surely the deception of innocents, the cant of common speech, and the celebration of everyday life and its disappointments and entrapments is at a pinnacle, elevating what was previously dissentient to a commonplace. Early discussions of the figure of the rogue and rogue literature concern themselves with the murkier aspects of the underworld, the criminal or seamier milieu of those who break rules or participate in unlawful acts, Text Matters, Volume 9, Number 9, 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.01