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The Age of Subtlety is the first book-length study to examine the seventeenth-century craze for rhetorical conceits in connection with scientific and technological debates. Focusing on Italy and Spain, it argues that these intricate and challenging metaphors became embodiments of a competition between natural and human ingenuity, as well as sites to reflect on the consequences of telescopic and microscopic vision, the boundaries between natural and artificial, and the generation of life.

From 1764 through 1766, John Dickinson’s writings reveal how he became a leading figure in the Pennsylvania Assembly and in the growing American resistance to unjust British taxation. Seeking protection of fundamental rights, he opposed Benjamin Franklin’s plan to abolish liberty of conscience in Pennsylvania, served as the lead draftsman in the Stamp Act Congress, and offered the American public the first practical advice on resisting British oppression.

The second edition of Consumer Culture explores the nature and role of consumption in modern societies. Celia Lury's revision of this classic establishes the importance of new object-based studies for consumer culture, and incorporates new chapters on branding and the rise of ethical consumption. Drawing on a wide range of studies, and using contemporary illustrations, the emergence of consumer culture and the changing relations between the production and consumption of cultural goods are examined. Lury argues that consumer culture has become increasingly stylized and now provides context for everyday creativity.

Ashis Nandy, one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, contends in this book that India’s political and cultural élites have been trying to impose a secular ideology on their country. This ideology makes little sense to most Indians, who have their own religious and cultural lives, their own diverse pasts, and their own principles of tolerance and hospitality.Religious extremists have exploited this tension by offering packaged forms of ancient faiths, with ready-made theories of violence and hatred. The resulting clash has fragmented Indians’ views of their precolonial past as well as their increasingly globalized present. In a country with deep roots in legendary pasts, some of these pasts have been made “silent” or “evasive” in the service of modern ideological agendas. They are no longer as easily drawn upon to oppose the forces of intolerance and hatred.Most of the essays survey the ways in which India’s colonial secularism has produced some of the conditions for the current rise of Hindu nationalism. He shows how both religious nationalists and secular modernists have employed the colonial state’s ideology-producing power to blend the “religious” and “secular” domains. In the process, the indigenous traditions battling sectarianism and religious extremism have been marginalized. Nandy argues that it is possible to reclaim India’s rich, multicultural pasts and alternative forms of cosmopolitanism in order to rescue a truly multicultural present.

Controlling Hollywood features ten innovative and accessible essays that examine some of the major turning points, crises, and contradictions affecting the making and showing of Hollywood movies from the 1910s through the early 1970s. The articles included here examine landmark legal cases; various self-regulating agencies and systems in the film industry (from the National Board of Review to the ratings system); and, external to Hollywood, the religious and social interest groups and government bodies that took a strong interest in film entertainment over the decades.