Clandestine literature, also called "underground literature", refers to a type of editorial and publishing process that involves self-publishing works, often in contradiction with the legal standards of a location. Clandestine literature is often an attempt to circumvent censorship, prosecution, or other suppression. In academic study, such literature may be referred to as heterodox publications (as opposed to officially sanctioned, orthodox publishing).
Examples of clandestine literature include the Samizdat literature of Soviet dissidents; the Aljamiado literature of Al-Andalus Spain; [1] and the nushu writing of some upper-class women in Hunan, China, from around the 10th century to the 19th century. [2] Clandestine publications were plentiful during the Enlightenment era in 18th-century France, circulating as pamphlets or manuscripts, [3] usually containing texts that would have been considered highly blasphemous by the Ancien Régime, or even straight out atheist. These clandestine manuscripts particularly flourished in the 1720s, and contained such controversial works as Treatise of the Three Impostors and the reverend Jean Mesliers Atheistic Testament. [4] Both texts were later published in edited versions by Voltaire, but handwritten manuscript copies have been found in private libraries all over Europe. The clandestine literature of 18th century France also consisted of printed works produced in neighbouring Switzerland or the Netherlands and smuggled into France. These books were usually termed "philosophical works", but varied greatly in content from pornography, utopian novels, political slander and actual philosophical works by radical enlightenment philosophers like Baron d'Holbach, Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [5]
Another notable example of clandestine literature is Bruce Bethke's short story "The Etymology of Cyberpunk" [6] which spawned an entire cyberpunk universe, proposing it as a label for a new generation of 'punk' teenagers inspired by the perceptions inherent to the Information Age. [7] [8]
The willingness to break the law may be due to ideological reasons, when works are contrary to government positions or pose a threat to the institutions in power, but also for reasons at a formal level, when publications do not comply with legal regulations imposed for the circulation of printed works. Underground literature is a type of clandestine literature that does not necessarily have the evasion of the censorship of the time as its purpose; the goal of its writers may only be to lower publishing costs, often being funded by the authors themselves.
Works that are originally published by clandestine means may eventually become established as canonical literature, such as Das Kapital and El Buscón .
A legitimate publisher in one jurisdiction may assist writers from elsewhere to circumvent their own laws by enabling them to publish abroad. The Olympia Press in Paris published several 20th-century English-language writers, including Henry Miller, who were facing censorship and possible prosecution in their own country at the time.
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe, especially Western Europe, in the 17th and 18th centuries, with global influences and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Latin, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian, German and Esperanto. According to Czesław Miłosz, for centuries Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction. The reasons were manifold but mostly rested on the historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers typically have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write, including past cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland, but also, Poland's collective incongruities demanding an adequate reaction from the writing communities of any given period.
Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because most typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship.
Christian Thomasius was a German jurist and philosopher.
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
Western literature, also known as European literature, is the literature written in the context of Western culture in the languages of Europe, and is shaped by the periods in which they were conceived, with each period containing prominent western authors, poets, and pieces of literature.
Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.
Ján Chryzostom Korec, SJ was a Slovak Jesuit priest and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was ordained as a priest in 1950 and consecrated as a bishop in 1951.
The Treatise of the Three Impostors was a long-rumored book denying all three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with the "impostors" of the title being Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad. Hearsay concerning such a book surfaces by the 13th century and circulates through the 17th century. Authorship of the hoax book was variously ascribed to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian writers. Fabrications of the text eventually begin clandestine circulation, with a notable French underground edition Traité sur les trois imposteurs first appearing in 1719.
Ero guro nansensu is a specific set of cultural trends that arose during the Shōwa era in Japan. Ero guro nansensu is a wasei-eigo word derived from the English words erotic, grotesque, and nonsense.
Polish underground press, devoted to prohibited materials, has a long history of combatting censorship of oppressive regimes in Poland. It existed throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including under foreign occupation of the country, as well as during the totalitarian rule of the pro-Soviet government. Throughout the Eastern Bloc, bibuła published until the collapse of communism was known also as samizdat.
Jacques-André Naigeon was a French artist, atheist–materialist philosopher, editor and man of letters best known for his contributions to the Encyclopédie and for reworking Baron d'Holbach's and Diderot's manuscripts.
Yevgeny Vladimirovich Kharitonov was a Russian writer, poet, playwright, and theater director.
Atheism, as defined by the entry in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, is "the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world. The simple ignorance of God doesn't constitute atheism. To be charged with the odious title of atheism one must have the notion of God and reject it." In the period of the Enlightenment, avowed and open atheism was made possible by the advance of religious toleration, but was also far from encouraged.
The Alexander Herzen Foundation was a non-profit foundation, legally established in 1969 in Amsterdam, dedicated to publish samizdat manuscripts from dissidents in the former Soviet Union in the original language or in translation. The Alexander Herzen Foundation was the first to publish accounts of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and the works of Andrei Amalrik, Yuli Daniel, Larisa Bogoraz, Andrei Sinyavsky, Pavel Litvinov and others in the West. The Foundation was ended legally in 1998.
This article focuses on Grub Street in France.
Deism, the religious attitude typical of the Enlightenment, especially in France and England, holds that the only way the existence of God can be proven is to combine the application of reason with observation of the world. A Deist is defined as "One who believes in the existence of a God or Supreme Being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason." Deism was often synonymous with so-called natural religion because its principles are drawn from nature and human reasoning. In contrast to Deism there are many cultural religions or revealed religions, such as Judaism, Trinitarian Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and others, which believe in supernatural intervention of God in the world; while Deism denies any supernatural intervention and emphasizes that the world is operated by natural laws of the Supreme Being.
"Cyberpunk" is a 1983 science fiction short story by Bruce Bethke, published in Amazing Stories. Bethke subsequently expanded the story into a novel and made it available online in 2001. The story is most famous for coining the term "cyberpunk", which came to be used to describe the science fiction subgenre featuring rebellious use of technology.
The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separated: the realm of high tech and the modern underground culture...
