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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments As a work of scholarship that has much to say about classroom issues, this book owes much to the stimulation and challenge I enjoyed in several introductory courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago, especially from 1979 to 1981. Actual work on this project began only in the late 1980s, and I thank the graduate students at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh who greatly contributed to my learning in our seminars together. Among those students, several have shared with me materials that actually or almost got into the book: Lynn Casmier-Paz, John W. Giles, Steve Parks, Christine Ross, and Julia Sawyer. Without a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities , which took me from the classroom, I could not have ended my work. Institutional support for research expenses from Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh has been indispensable . I am especially grateful to my research assistants: Eleni Coundouriotis, Peaches Henry, Rebecca Dean, Cela Mascarenhas, Gwen Gorzelsky, Lisa Roulette, Sara London, Kelly Amienne, Roger LePage, and Lynn Harper. Lectures and colloquia with colleagues provided very helpful occasions to tryout portions of my argument. First thanks must go to Janice Carlisle and the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature and to Michael Riffaterre and the School of Criticism and Theory, whose invitations provoked my earliest chapter drafts in 1990. Along the way, thanks to many others who invited or welcomed me, some more than once, to their campuses: Paul Armstrong (University of Oregon); Susan BaMe (Beaver College); Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Christopher Looby, and Laurence Rothfield (University 221 222 Acknowledgments of Chicago); David Bromwich and Carl Hovde (Columbia University Trilling Seminars in Criticism); Christopher Castiglia (Bryn Mawr College); Pat Crain and Eric Haralson (Columbia University Columbus Circle); Wai-Chee Dimock and Masao Miyoshi (University of California-San Diego); John Eperjesi (Carnegie-Mellon University ); Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman (University of Pennsylvania ); Michael T. Gilmore (Brandeis University); Gunter Lenz (Humboldt University); Kathryne Lindberg (Wayne State University ); Daniel O'Hara (Temple University); Donald Pease (Dartmouth College); Q. S. Tong (Hong Kong University); Herbert F. Tucker (University of Virginia). Also welcome were invitations to speak at meetings, from Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Cyrus Patell, Bruce Robbins, and Wang Ning. This book would not have been possible without the advance commitment and enthusiasm for the project, and the long-term patience , shown by Frank Lentricchia, editor of the American Writers Project, and Allen Fitchen, Director of the University of Wisconsin Press. My thanks also to the editors and publishers in whose pages preliminary versions of a few portions have appeared: Paul Bove, editor of boundary 2, Donald Pease, editor of the special issue, and Duke University Press for "Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn" (a first version of chapter 6), from boundary 2 19.1 (1992): 14-33; Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman, volume editors, and Oxford University Press for "Whitman and Problems of the Vernacular " (from which I draw a few pages on vernacular in chapter 7 and on creole in chapter 8) in Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (1995): 44-61; Marshall Brown, volume editor, and Duke University Press for "What Is the History of Literature?" (from which I draw a few pages in the Coda), in The Uses ofLiterary History (1995): 23-33; Gordon Hutner, editor, and Oxford University Press for "Putting the River on New Maps: Nation, Race, and Beyond in Reading Huckleberry Finn" (used in part in part of chapter 8), American Literary History 8.1 (1996): 110-29. This book is not an attack on the community of scholars who work on Mark Twain. Although I may seem ungrateful, I must emphasize that the members of this community with whom I have had contact have been uniformly gracious and collegial. Since my concern has mainly been to argue with prestigious writings that, however valuable in themselves, have contributed to a state of public discussion that I lament and oppose, it would have overburdened [44.202.90.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:59 GMT) Acknowledgments 223 my pages also to detail all those whose published work on Huckleberry Finn I admire. But I must mention Wayne Booth, Forrest Robinson, and Steven Mailloux for work in which I recognize kindred concerns, whether they agree with me or not. As I began to write on Ralph Ellison, Robert J. Corber and Alan Nadel offered supportive criticism. I have been very lucky in my friends. Over the years I pursued this work, several of...