This is a major survey of how towns were governed in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. A new kind of politics emerged out of England's Civil War: partisan politics. This happened first in the corporations governing the towns, and not at Parliament as is usually argued. Based on an examination of the records of scores of corporations, this book explains how war unleashed a cycle of purge and counter-purge which continued for decades. It also explains how a society that feared a system of politics based on division found the means to absorb it peacefully. As conflict sharpened in communities everywhere, local competitors turned to the court of King's Bench to resolve their differences. In doing so, they prompted the court to develop a new body of law that protected local governments from the divisive impulses within them.

A host of Chilean films, the fiction of Alberto Fuguet, Marco Antonio de la Parra, Isabel Allende and Jose Donoso, and hundreds of detention and torture centers that have been razed, abandoned or returned from the clandestine to serve as schools, stadiums, hotels and churches are all emblematic of this anti-statist, micro-political remembering. A photographic "topoanalysis" of torture centers reveals that much like palimpsests---ancient Roman wax-coated tablets that were inscribed, scraped and re-inscribed---the ethnographies of torture sites bleed through with horrific narratives that unsettle the dictator's historical project while suggesting geographically "housed" memories that cultivate unresolved mnemonic tensions. I conclude that today Chile contends with the legacy of authoritarianism primarily via a destape (a "socio-sexual uncorking"). By parading naked bodies and sexuality in public, individuals recall somatic tortures and demand future political transparency. In this way, contemporary culture has settled on a potent palimpsest---the layered meanings of flesh---yet, this destape also reveals that the dictator's neo-capitalism has triumphed as the body has become the primary object of consumptive pleasure.

This book is the first study of disability in postcolonial fiction. Focusing on canonical novels, it explores the metaphorical functions and material presence of disabled child characters. Barker argues that progressive disability politics emerge from postcolonial concerns, and establishes dialogues between postcolonialism and disability studies.

This book examines the uses of conspiracy tropes in post-Soviet culture, providing the first systematic, in-depth analysis of Russia's most paranoid contemporary authors.

Witchcraft, Witch-hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England constitutes a wide-ranging and original overview of the place of witchcraft and witch-hunting in the broader culture of early modern England. Based on a mass of new evidence extracted from a range of archives, both local and national, it seeks to relate the rise and decline of belief in witchcraft, alongside the legal prosecution of witches, to the wider political culture of the period. Building on the seminal work of scholars such as Stuart Clark, Ian Bostridge, and Jonathan Barry, Peter Elmer demonstrates how learned discussion of witchcraft, as well as the trials of those suspected of the crime, were shaped by religious and political imperatives in the period from the passage of the witchcraft statute of 1563 to the repeal of the various laws on witchcraft. In the process, Elmer sheds new light upon various issues relating to the role of witchcraft in English society, including the problematic relationship between puritanism and witchcraft as well as the process of decline.