The first work of narrative prose in Spanish America to openly proclaim itself a work of fiction and to associate itself with the novel is El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), by the Mexican pamphleteer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. Elevated to a classic by the Spanish American critical tradition, El Periquillo, like many other classics, is more talked-about than read. Although a substantial body of criticism has already accreted around it, much of that consists of repetitions of prior judgments by earlier analysts of Lizardi's text or of readings that are more attentive to the sociocultural and lexicographic information contained in the text than to its intrinsic formal and rhetorical attributes. Valued mostly for its depiction of the manners and mores of early nineteenth-century Mexico, essentially as a precursor of costumbrismo, scant attention has been paid to its figural elements.