Writers who engage in defensive esotericism find ways to communicate with two audiences to avoid persecution: they write an accessible, publicly-oriented exoteric text, and a concealed esoteric text to their circle of receptive readers.
The Penn Libraries and Khajistan have collaborated to bring several groupings of ephemera, popular magazines, pulp fiction, and rare books to campus, and we’re currently working to make these available to researchers from around the world.
The Penn Libraries has recently acquired several issues of the women’s journal Nova khata (New Home), which offer a unique window into Ukrainian culture as it existed a century ago.
To more accurately reflect the diversity of literature in China, the Penn Libraries has made a special effort to add recent internet novels that have been published in print form to our collection.
The Penn Libraries has been expanding its selections of streaming films by working with distributors of international cinema like ArtMattan, Typecast Films, and the Media Education Foundation.
The Penn Libraries is partnering with independent bookstores in Philadelphia to help us expand our collections of materials representing small presses, local authors, and specialized scholarly and artistic communities.
The Penn Libraries has recently acquired or made newly accessible a range of materials relating to colonial Korea that include a variety of primary and secondary sources in both Korean and Japanese.