The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts

Acknowledgments

t q cknowledgments  am happy to acknowledge the institutional support of Rhodes College , which provided the sabbatical leave in 1999 during which I wrote most of this book. I am especially grateful to John Planchon, then dean of academic affairs, who went out of his way to advance what must have seemed a rather peculiar project. I benefited from the generosity shown to Rhodes College by Connie and Dunbar Abston. The Folger Shakespeare Library granted me a short-term fellowship in 1999 that proved extremely valuable. I am grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for permission to reproduce the illustrations and to Dean Robert Llewellyn at Rhodes College for funds allowing their appearance here. Parts of the work were presented at the Modern Language Association conference in 2001, at the International Conference on Narrative at Dartmouth College in 1999, in seminars at meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America in 1999 and 2000, and at the World Shakespeare Congress in 1996. My thanks to the sponsors and audiences of these events. It is a pleasure to thank other individuals who helped this book come to fruition. My colleagues in the English department at Rhodes College have provided a congenial and stimulating environment; special thanks to Bob Entzminger, a longtime supportor of my work. Early in the project, exchanges with Barbara Baines and Sara Eaton prompted my thinking about early modern pornography and violence, and Lisa S. Starks inspired my emerging ideas about the literature of sadomasochism. David McCarthy offered concepts and materials that proved important for chapter 4. For their support and guidance, I am grateful to Bruce Smith, Martha Ronk, and Christy Desmet. Mary Marshall answered my questions about human physiology , some of them quite extreme, with impressive equanimity and thoroughness . Ellen Armour, Gordon Bigelow, Bob Entzminger, and Gail Kern Paster read portions of the manuscript and provided helpful comments. Amy Hollywood enabled this project in all kinds of crucial ways: she challenged me to write about Foxe, advised my understandings of Lacan, read the entire manuscript with her usual penetrating insight, and guided the book to its completion; her contribution, and my thanks, would be difficult to overstate. For his support, incisive suggestions, and intellectual generosity , I owe a profound debt to Jonathan Crewe. I am grateful as well to an anonymous reader for Johns Hopkins University Press whose acute insights and sympathetic criticism helped me improve the book. My thanks to my editor Maura Burnett for her skill, efficiency, and imagination and to Linda Forlifer for guiding the book into print. As for my family, the poise and intensity with which they pursue their own work has inspired me, while their attitude of tolerant interest toward this book has aided me in writing it. Among her other gifts, Anna Traverse proved remarkably adept at sorting out the details of martyrologies. John Traverse contributed to the project at every stage, with characteristic generosity. t xii q Acknowledgments The Shattering of the Self This page intentionally left blank ...