The term anamorphosis, from the Greek ana ("again") and morphe ("shape"), designates a variety of perspective experiments that can be traced back to the artistic developments of the 1500s and early 1600s. Anamorphic devices challenge viewers to experience different forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. Images shift in front of the eyes of the puzzled spectators as they move from the center of the representation to the margins, or from one side to the other.

(A)wry Views demonstrates that much of the literature of the Spanish Golden Age (roughly 1550-1650) is similarly susceptible to a mode of interpretation that permits, and indeed requires, "oblique readings." Thus the perspectivist tendencies that are characteristic of the work of Miguel de Cervantes and many of the picaresque narratives of the period -- including the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache, and Lopez de Ubeda's La picara Justina -- invite the reader to actively participate in a game of displacements and sudden revelations.

As with the optical illusions of anamorphosis, this reading game may well result in a questioning of the fit between reality and perception, perhaps even in a suspension of commonly held beliefs about the world and our place in it.