Knowing Fictions

Barbara Fuchs is Professor of Spanish and English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature and Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain, as well as the translations "The Abencerraje" and "Ozmin and Daraja": Two Sixteenth-Century Novellas from Spain and Cervantes's "The Bagnios of Algiers" and "The Great Sultana": Two Plays of Captivity, all of which are available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Those familiar with Fuchs's previous scholarship will not be surprised that Knowing Fictions is seasoned with lucid and highly fecund arguments, but they will surely relish the penetrating and often dazzling parallels that she draws both within her objects of analysis and across texts, genres, and geographic locales. Scholars of early modern Spain will find in this study a refreshingly new take on the picaresque, while those working in other disciplines, eras, and national traditions will discover a trove of original insights to enrich their work farther afiel —value propositions that not even the most skeptical reader can deny." (Modern Language Quarterly) "With its theoretically nimble introduction, a timely postscript, and four chapters that richly contextualize then animate close, critical readings, Knowing Fictions makes a compelling case for exploring and often trespassing beyond the conventional generic borders of the early modern Spanish picaresque...Knowing Fictions, reading and weighing early modern Spanish picaresque writing, finds other learned, skeptical, and unequivocally admirable ways to be epistemologically attentive." (Modern Philology) "Knowing Fictions makes an original, sophisticated and timely contribution to the fields of siglo de oro and early modern studies. Barbara Fuchs builds on exquisitely contextualized close readings of a series of canonical and non-canonical first-person biographical and pseudo-biographical narratives and witness accounts to advance a new theory of the picaresque as a self-conscious or 'knowing' narrative form that educates readers in the art of critical media consumption." (David Castillo, University at Buffalo)

• IntroductionChapter 1. Imperial Picaresques: La Lozana Andaluza and Spanish RomeChapter 2. Picaresque Captivity: The Viaje de TurquÍa and its Cervantine IterationsChapter 3. "O Te Digo Verdades o Mentiras": Crediting the PÍcaro in GuzmÁn de AlfaracheChapter 4. Cervantes' Skeptical Picaresques and the Pact of FictionalityPostscript. The Fact of FictionNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments