In Knowing Fictions, Barbara Fuchs engages the picaresque as a set of literary strategies that interrogate the mechanisms of truth-telling itself and shows how picaresque texts effectively encouraged readers to adopt a critical stance toward the truth claims implicit in the forms of authoritative discourse proliferating in Imperial Spain.

Introduction
Chapter 1. Imperial Picaresques: La Lozana Andaluza and Spanish Rome
Chapter 2. Picaresque Captivity: The Viaje de Turquía and its Cervantine Iterations
Chapter 3. "O Te Digo Verdades o Mentiras": Crediting the Pícaro in Guzmán de Alfarache
Chapter 4. Cervantes' Skeptical Picaresques and the Pact of Fictionality
Postscript. The Fact of Fiction
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments