“An impressive work of outstanding scholarship, The Underground Reader: Sources in the Transatlantic Counterculture… is an exceptionally work of seminal scholarship and very highly recommended, especially for personal and academic library Philosophy collections.” · Midwest Book Review
Description
Every society has rebels, outlaws, troublemakers, and deviants. This collection of primary sources takes readers on a journey through the intellectual and cultural history of the “underground” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It demonstrates how thinkers in the US and Europe have engaged in an ongoing trans-Atlantic dialogue, inspiring one another to challenge the norms of Western society. Through ideas, artistic expression, and cultural practices, these thinkers radically defied the societies of which they were part. The readings chart the historical evolution of challenges to mainstream values -- some of which have themselves become mainstream -- from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present.
Jeffrey H. Jackson is the J.J. McComb Professor of History at Rhodes College and the author of Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Duke UP 2003) and Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave 2010).
Robert Francis Saxe is Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College and author of Settling Down: World War II Veterans’ Challenge to the Postwar Consensus (Palgrave 2007).