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Acknowledgments This book has survived only by way of tiny cataclysms and comic catastrophes, much like its eponymous heroine, and through the kindness of many strangers and friends, whose gifts—so generously were theyoffered, so shamelessly were they accepted—have by now become thefts. I am, in other words, seriously in debt. One of the suggestions of this book is that there is no way to repay a debt, but that saying thank you seems to make those who owe, and those who are owed, feel a little bit better. Thank you, then: To Marjorie Garber, Per Nykrog, Stephen Owen, Susan Suleiman, Jan Ziolkowski , and all of my teachers and mentors and colleagues at the Department of Comparative Literature and the Literature Concentration at Harvard University, where much of this book was written as a doctoral dissertation; but especially to my dissertation advisers, Margaret Alexiou, Barbara Johnson, and Gregory Nagy, a most enviable triumvirate. This book and, in fact, my entire academic career owes more to Barbara, perhaps, than to anyone else as simply the best teacher I ever had. To Chris Braider, Margaret Ferguson, Paul Gordon, Ralph Hexter, Vernon Minor, the Department of Humanities and Comparative Literature, and the participants in the College Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities on ‘‘Discourses of History,’’ all at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and to Keith Cohen, Heather Evans, Katherine Lydon, Mary Lydon, Sylvia Montiglio, and Jane Tylus at the Universityof Wisconsin–Madison. All of them in various ways helped to rescue Helen from the overgrown and entangled forest that was my manuscript. To the Office of the Provost at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, for a research grant that allowed me to meet with my editors at the University of Wisconsin Press and to hand over to them, safe and sound, a new and improved Helen, complete with make-over and considerably slimmer. To Carla Aspelmeier, Jane Barry, Amalia Culp, Sheila McMahon, and Alison Ruch, who all worked very hard at the University of Wisconsin Press and demonstrated patience of heroic proportions in dealing with a difficult and unwieldy 320 Acknowledgments 321 text; especially to Raphael Kadushin, without whom this book might not have been published—at least not yet. Last but most certainly not least, to all of those friends who, through the years, kept vigil over Helen and, on a number of occasions, resuscitated her (or was it me?) when she (I) was on the point of expiring: Patricia Barbeitos, Alessandra Benedicty, Florence Bernault, Ksenija Bilbija, Elena Coda, Laura Deluca, Karl-Heinz Finken, Nina Gellert, Sarah Gore, Richard Halpern,Gillian Johnson, Svetlana Karpe, Gerhard Richter, Patrick and Graziella Rumble, and Monique Tschofen; but above all to Christopher Calderhead, Vangelis Calotychos , José Manuel Delpino, Rhonda Garelick, and Tania November; and to my parents Esther and Gary, and my brother, Eric. A special thank you must go, finally, to Elizabeth Amann, whose unrelenting and unforgiving critical intelligence, and simple common sense, transformed this book from something pretty bad into something, well, maybe not so bad. ...

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