readers audience

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.