Cult fiction
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"One is not criminal for painting the strange tendencies inspired by nature"--Marquis de Sade "The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalogue of banned books." --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg "I know of no bomb other than a book" --Stéphane Mallarmé "Any list of cult fiction will feature Lucian, Apuleius, Rabelais, Brantôme, Sterne, Sade, De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, Zola, Kafka, Lovecraft, Céline, Bataille, Borges, Simenon, Cortazar, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Saramago, Amis and Houellebecq."--Sholem Stein |
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Cult fiction is a term used to denote fiction that has attracted a cult following. This category does not include non-fiction.
On a general level, books that tend to attract a cult following include banned books, transgressive fiction, controversial books, erotic literature, ergodic literature, drug literature, and some genre fiction. The earliest compilation of cult fiction was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (index of prohibited books) by the Catholic church, although most books on that list were non-fiction.
Broadly the category can be divided in two, cult because of the themes of its subject matter and cult because of form such as ergodic literature, nonlinear narratives or metafiction.
The term cult fiction, which was first attested in the late 1980s is probably a calque from cult movies or cult films, a term which as been in use since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before this, cult fiction was the province of bibliophiles who were hunting for curiosa.
A precursor to the late 20th meaning of the term cult fiction was The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson, a work that delved into the countercultural significance of the novel.
And in the 19th century, there were the excesses as highlighted by Nordau, Krafft-Ebing and Praz.
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Bibliography
Avant la lettre
- Curiosities of Literature (4 vols. 1791-1823; single vol. 1824) by Isaac D'Israeli
- Anthology of Black Humor (1940) by André Breton
As a genre
- Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature (1992) by Thomas Reed Whissen
- Cult Fiction: A Reader's Guide (1998) by Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard
- Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory (1998) by Clive Bloom
- The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) by various
See also
- Cult classic
- Underground literature
- Subversion
- Book censorship
- Jahsonic's literary canon
- Non-mainstream
- One-hit wonder
- Books about books