LAUSR

Abstract Counter nostalgia is an ethically-informed dialogic mirror of a complicated and at times irrational, conflicted Spanish past, without needing the recourse of postmodernist ironic devices. When Francoist censorship was at its harshest, Miguel Delibes (1920–2010) and Ana María Matute (1925–2014), in their early novels, combine mimetic realism that includes damning material aspects of their local Spanish social and natural environments with both nostalgic and counter-nostalgic discourses concerning the difficult, constrictive social realities of pre-civil war Spain. Using the Francoist censorship files, I show how censors allowed these challenging works to pass.