How is a reader to trust the account of someone who subsists on the ability to deceive? How to accredit a narrator whose welfare hinges on the credibility of the story itself? By what means might an impoverished rogue character lay claim to veracity, much less deliver on the promise of moral edification, in a milieu where such values were invariably mediated by wealth, status, and notions of confessional and ethnic purity? These questions have figured centrally, albeit implicitly, in literary criticism of the picaresque, yet never have they been posed with such intergeneric and geographic breadth, or given rise to hypotheses as tantalizing and persuasive, as in Barbara Fuchs’s latest book. By mining the early modern Spanish literary and historical canons for rich, unseen veins of narrative instability and incertitude, Knowing Fictions assembles a more capacious frame for the picaresque, one less dependent on the thematic markers that traditionally...
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