literary canon

The paper examines songs with love and erotic content, dating back from the so-called National Revival Period. They used to be visible part of the popular culture of Bulgaria and the Southeastern Europe region in initial decades of the Modern Bulgarian statehood. These songs were originally written in Bulgarian and in Turkish, but with Cyrillic alphabet. Turkish ones are introduced for the first time in Bulgarian Literary History Studies. They were taken from books by Manol Lazarov, Petko Slaveykov, and by an unidentified author with initials K.S.M. This popular literature genre had a complex biography, following to some extent the ideological planning of the Bulgarian society and the social trajectory of the ideas of the nation, particular for that period. Initially, they were well accepted, so they gained vast popularity. Such a positive reception was particular for the period, when they were not experienced as non-matching to the emerging national ideology. Coincidingly with the rising of Bulgarian nationalism, their popularity decreased and they accumulated certain criticism, so in the beginning of the XX c. they were marginalized. In the last decades of XIX s., according to the changes of the ideological climate in Bulgaria, some of them were reinterpreted in a patriotic key.

The article examines the efforts to define and typologize Bulgarian "alternative" literature, which is usually associated with oppositional behavior and is frequently found in the writings of repressed authors, political emigrants, and underappreciated writers, as well as in the manifestations of "samizdat". The approach put forth here broadens the chronological range of the phenomena under consideration, searches for linkages and conflicts between them and the literary canon, literary stratification, and differentiation of the readers, and also concentrates on texts that defy conventional literary status. Different sorts of these "alternative" texts are identified, some of which are connected to folklore subgenres that lack prestige and reader preferences for works that literary criticism treats negatively.