The Underground Reader: Sources in the Trans-Atlantic Counterculture (Transatlantic Perspectives, 4)

Hardcover, vii + 231 pages, NOT ex-library. Minor handling wear. Books looks unread, clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Issued without a dust jacket. -- Compiled by historians Jeffrey H. Jackson and Robert Francis Saxe, this anthology provides a collection of primary source documents tracing the evolution of countercultural movements across the Atlantic. Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the text examines how ideas of rebellion and alternative lifestyles migrated between major cultural hubs such as Paris, London, and New York. The editors gather manifestos, literary excerpts, political tracts, and song lyrics from a diverse array of subversive groups. The chronological narrative moves from the bohemians and utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century to the Beat Generation, radical student movements of the 1960s, and the pioneers of punk and hip hop. A central theme of the volume is the conceptual shift of the underground itself, demonstrating how the term evolved from representing literal subterranean spaces to defining ideological resistance against mainstream bourgeois society, capitalism, and state authority. By placing these historically distinct subcultures side by side, the book serves as a vital academic resource for sociology and history students. It demonstrates that modern counterculture is not an isolated contemporary phenomenon, but rather a deeply rooted and continuous tradition of political and artistic dissent shared across two continents. -- Contents: Introduction; Roots of a Transatlantic Underground, 1851-1909 [Henri Murger, Henry David Thoreau, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Arthur Rimbaud, George Du Maurier, Alfred Jarry, Georges Sorel, F.T. Marinetti]; Underground Haunts: Montmartre and Greenwich Village, 1913-1927 [Theodore Dreiser, Konrad Bercovici, Floyd Dell, Hugo Ball]; War and New Generations, 1934-1956 [Sylvia Beach, Malcolm Cowley, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein]; Black, Cool, and Hip, 1934-1961 [George Antheil, Boris Vian (Vernon Sullivan), Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Franz Fanon]; Rethinking Gender and Sexuality, 1913-1970 [Emma Goldman, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, Carl Wittman]; Challengers to Conformity, 1955-1969 [Herbert Marcuse, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Rudi Dutschke, Václav Havel]. …