Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere Transnational Perspectives

Censorship and its counterpart - the 'underground' production and distribution of printed texts and images - have existed ever since a 'public sphere' came into being. This book approaches the phenomenon of underground publishing by covering various cases from the Tsarist Empire, the Soviet Union, Central Europe, South America, and China. From a global perspective, the well-known practice of samizdat - under Communist rule, a key form of dissident activity in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader - may be understood as part of a long tradition of underground publishing that is still relevant today in places like Russia, Iran, or China. (Series: Wiener Studien zur Zeitgeschichte - Vol. 6)