Demythification in the Fiction of Miguel Delibes

This work offers a comprehensive examination of Miguel Delibes as a social critic who subtly questions, decenters, and demythifies the Francoist mythical values of a society in search of its essence, projected in the Nationalists’ myth of heroism and the Crusade, the myth of detachment, stoicism, integration, and the myth of progress. This book seeks to demonstrate that the Franco government, like any totalitarian regime, appropriated myth as a tool for the dissemination of its ideology. This study is of unique importance because, unlike Goytisolo, Torrente Ballester, Martin-Santos, and Benet, who have been identified as demythifiers, no study has examined Delibes’ fiction from the point of view of demythification.