"Home is a novelist, art agitator, and documenter of art terrorism... The art terrorist's art terrorist." "Modern Review." "Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis" is concerned with what's been happening at the cutting edge of culture since the demise of Fluxus and the Situationists. It provides inside information on the Neoists, Plagiarists, Art Strikers, London Psychogeographical Association, K Foundation, and other groups that are even more obscure. "

"A Neoist Research Project" is the first comprehensive anthology and source book of Neoism, an international collective network of mostly anonymous and pseudonymous subcultural actionists and speculative experimenters. It consists of more than one hundred Neoist texts and two hundred images documenting diverse Neoist interventions, Neoist Apartment Festivals, definitions and pamphlets of Neoism and affiliated currents, language and identity experiments, and Neoist memes such as the shared identity Monty Cantsin. From the contents: "Neoist Chair and Chair Action," "Death Mauses Meat Pieces," "Kline Bottle Pieces," "Street performance actions against false infinity," "APT 4, Low Theatre, Montreal," "Neoist Parking Meter Action: Pay Me to Go Away," "Direct Address," "Contract," "The Ceiling Crashes in," "Neoism 101: Thought Projection," "Our Tactics against Stockhausen," "Seven Scripts for One Week of Neoist Activity," "Hypnotic Movement: Concrete Life Examples," "Macmag Virus," "March 24," "Cogito of the pseudo-scientist, experimenting with mild trauma," "Physics," "The Comb," "the gold flag of near neologisms: the striped page," "The White Head," "APT 5," "What is an uh, uh, Apartment Festival," "Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing," "Impractical Seriousness," "Krononautic Divector Field Didaction," "Chronicle of the Neoast Observer at the So-Called Millionth Apartment Festival," "3 part action," "Neoist haircut," "non-participation," "Philosopher's Union soapbox stand," "anything is anything," "language constructions," "Dyslexia," "Continuity Poem (cinematic version)," "A note from the editors of SMILE," "Dialectical Immaterialism," "Formula," "The Last Words of Wilhelm Reich, continued," "Theology," "Plenial Wer," "anti-art is art," "Censorship - the oldest of suppressed traditions," "Proletarian Posturing and the Strike which never Ends," "Neoism is simple," "What is Neoism?," "The First Announcement of Neoism," "The Generation Positive and Neoism," "Origins of Neoism Illuminated," "Bread + Pain + Love = Total Sex," " anti-post-actualism++++++," "Western Cell Division," "Akademgorod," "Why Neoists do not drink alcohol," "The Eroticism of Boredom," "The Concept of Monty Cantsin," "Stupid Undergrounds," "Neoism propaganda sheet 1: SMILE," "Lt. Murnau," "Luther Blissett," "SMILE," "Blood, Bread and Beauty," "Plagerism," "The Curse of Originality," "The 56 Laws of Neoism."

Shift Linguals traces a history of the cut-up method, the experimental writing practice discovered by Brion Gysin and made famous by Beat author William S. Burroughs. From the groundbreaking works of Dada and Surrealism that paved the way for Burroughs’ breakthrough, through the countercultural explosion of the 1960s, Shift Linguals explores the evolution of the cut-ups within the theoretical frameworks of postmodernism and the avant-garde to arrive at the present and the digital age. Some 50 years on from the first ‘discovery’ of the cut-ups in 1959, it is only now that we are truly able to observe the method’s impact, not only on literature, but on music and culture in a broader sense. The result of over nine years of research, this study represents the first sustained and detailed analysis of the cut-ups as a narrative form. With explorations of the works of Burroughs, Gysin, Kathy Acker, and John Giorno, it also contains the first critical writing on the works of Claude Pélieu and Carl Weissner in English, as well as the first in-depth discussion of the writing of Stewart Home to date.

This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.

“Eravamo anti-sistema in tutto e per tutto, nella musica e nell’arte. Volevamo distruggere qualsiasi cosa avesse regole prestabilite, tutto quel che c’era di asfissiante, tutte le certezze. Eravamo decisi a infrangere tutte le regole in tutti i modi possibili”. La Londra di Barry Miles è quella della cultura underground che nasce fra le macerie della Seconda guerra mondiale ed esplode nel corso degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, concentrandosi sul West End e su Soho, le zone in cui era confluita un’eterogenea popolazione di personaggi creativi e fuori dalle righe, intolleranti nei confronti delle costrizioni della cultura e del costume ufficiale: scrittori, poeti, registi, musicisti, artisti, pubblicitari, architetti, stilisti, e una miriade di più anonimi personaggi decisi a fare della propria vita un’arte. È la storia di una rivoluzione culturale determinata a ottenere una “totale confusione dei sensi”, che si sviluppa fra le vie di una metropoli artisticamente onnivora, fatta di locali, librerie, club, pub, teatri, piazze, vicoli, scantinati, case occupate o case borghesi. Una storia di sconvolgente energia vitale e al tempo stesso autodistruttiva, raccontata sul filo di quell’ironia che solo un testimone diretto può comunicare. Mettere in fila i nomi che si incontrano fra queste pagine fa tremare l’idea stessa di ‘controcultura’, poiché vi si ritrova molta della creatività che animerà per ibridazione la cultura ufficiale del Novecento: Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, i Situazionisti, il cool jazz, il rock ’n’ roll, Mary Quant, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard, i Rolling Stones, i Beatles, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, i Pink Floyd, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Townshend, Yoko Ono, Derek Jarman, David Hockney, i Clash, i Police, Gilbert & George, Vivienne Westwood, i Sex Pistols, Boy George, Charles Saatchi, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst e moltissimi altri. Un libro-mondo brulicante di storie e di personaggi, il ritratto più preciso e divertente mai scritto sull’avventura gloriosa e infame di un’epoca oggi entrata nella leggenda.

Identifying 'permissive populism', the trickle down of permissiveness into mass consumption, as a key feature of the 1970s, Leon Hunt considers the values of an ostensibly 'bad' decade and analyses the implications of the 1970s for issues of taste and cultural capital. Hunt explores how the British cultural landscape of the 1970s coincided with moral panics, the troubled Heath government, the three day week and the fragmentation of British society by nationalism, class conflict, race, gender and sexuality.

This book examines youth cultural responses to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that affected Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, it considers the extent to which elements of youth culture and popular music served to contest the notion of ‘consensus’ that historians and social commentators have suggested served to frame British polity from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The collection argues that aspects of youth culture appear to have revealed notable fault-lines in and across British society and provided alternative perspectives and reactions to the presumptions of mainstream political and cultural opinion in the period. This, perhaps, was most acute in the period leading up to and after the seemingly pivotal moment of Margaret Thatcher’s election to prime minister in 1979. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.