From the early 1960s through the decade following Franco's death in 1975, a group of left-wing Spanish writers published novels which integrate three interdisciplinary theories related to the ongoing plight of the alienation of contemporary man: (i) Karl Marx's socioeconomic theory of alienation (1984a); (ii) Roland Barthes's theory of the linguistic method by which the ruling class naturalizes social myths for the purpose of mass consumption, followed by his proposed ‘demythifying’ process by which the self-serving intentions of social myths may be unmasked (1957); and (iii) the eclectic, new realism of the German playwright, poet and literary theorist, Bertolt Brecht.

The result is an amalgam: a novel that is both a story and one that debunks myths. Between 1961 and 1973 several such works attempted to counteract the rhetoric associated with the Franco regime: national supremacy, the notion that liberalism and individualism were unpatriotic, the myth of Spain's Siglo de Oro (or Golden Age), the code of honor, the bullfight as national spectacle, the concept of sexual decency, the Spanish State and Catholic Church as a single indissoluble entity, and so on.

The best known novelists involved in this assault on received wisdom are Luis Martín-Santos, whose only completed work, *Tiempo de silencio (1961), initiated the sub-genre of the socio-critical realist novel, and Juan Goytisolo, whose adherence to the principles of literary demythification spans nearly two decades and who wrote five such works: *Señas de identidad (1966), *Reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970), *Juan sin Tierra (1975), *Makbara (1980) and *Paisajes después de la batalla (1982). Jesús López-Pacheco, Pablo Gil Casado, and Luis Goytisolo each produced one such novel: La hoja de parra (1973), El paralelepípedo (1977) and Fábulas (1980), respectively. We shall concentrate here on the novels of Luis Martín-Santos and Juan Goytisolo.

Thanks to the economic, cultural and political instability of the 1960s, the focused and objective social realism we find in works of the previous decade is supplanted – initially by Luis Martín-Santos – by a subjective approach concentrating on the psyche of the characters involved and replacing plain, accessible language with periphrasis and a more convoluted literary style which we might call neo-Baroque. Among the demythifying novelists’ most effective tools is ironic contrast, a technique familiar to readers of seventeenth-century Spanish poetry and satire. Visually, the reader is caught off-guard by the striking contrast between long, periphrastic sentences and short, pithy dialogue.