Cervantes's "Don Quixote" confronts us with a series of enigmas that, over the centuries, have divided even its most expert readers: does the text pursue a serious or comic purpose? Does it promote the truth of history and the untruth of fiction, or the truth of poetry and the fictiveness of truth itself? In a study that aims to revise the way we read and debate "Don Quixote", Charles Presberg discusses the topic of paradox as a governing rhetorical strategy in this most canonical of Spanish literary texts. To situate Cervantes's masterpiece within the centuries-long praxis of paradoxical discourse in the west, Presberg surveys its tradition in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the European Renaissance. He outlines the development of paradoxy in the Spanish Renaissance, centering on works by Fernando de Rojas, Pero Mexia and Antonio de Guevara. In his detailed reading of portions of "Don Quixote", Presberg shows how Cervantes's work enlarges the tradition of paradoxical discourse by imitating as well as transforming fictional and non-fictional models. He concludes that Cervantes's seriocomic "system" of paradoxy jointly parodies, celebrates and urges us to ponder the agency of discourse in the continued refashioning of knowledge history, culture and personal identity.