Today Picaresque is a Catch-All Term, Which Literary Critics and General Readers Use to Characterize Almost any Story of playfulness and mischief. It has been stretched across so many national boundaries that any notion of its historical or geographic referents is often lost. The central character, an antihero, seems to express the author's devilry and wit rather than any social criticism. This view, growing out of readers' preference for pleasant entertainment and critics' focus on language and form, sees no more than an on-the-road plot, with “adventures” ending whenever the author chooses to stop. However, this sense of the picaresque forgets the complex, frequently damning portrayal of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain that the picaresque's original stories provided, as well as the contestation of the genre in postrevolutionary France, where it describes high crimes and suggests their punishment.