True Lies

True Lies is a comprehensive study of the evolving functions of narrative self-consciousness in contemporary Spain. While the foundational studies of metafiction - by Alter, Scholes, Hutcheon, Waugh, Spires, and the others - have illustrated how self-conscious writing serves to blur the distinction between reality and fiction in order to draw attention to the dynamic processes of literary representation, True Lies takes into account a fundamental issue overlooked by earlier treatments of the genre: namely, the importance of consciousness itself to this type of fiction. In the contemporary Spanish cultural context, novelists have increasingly explored the role of narrative in the construction and understanding of the self. This books shows how recent novels by Rosa Montero, Nuria Amat, Javier Cercas, Juan Jose Millas, Javier Marias, and Carlos Caneque use metafiction in order to question the relationship between reality and make-believe, to scrutinize the dynamic nature of personal identity; to problematize the historiographical enterprise; to evaluate critically the process of canon formation; and to parody themselves and the poetics of self-consciousness.