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Acknowledgments This book has been a long time in the making, and the debts I have incurred over the years have been many. For support while this project was in its earliest stages, I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities as well as to the Penn-in-London fellowship program . As a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I have received grants from the Campus Research Board and, even more fortuitously, a year's fellowship support from the Institute for the Humanities. A four-month fellowship at the Huntington Library was critical to moving this project forward; these were surely some of the most pleasurable months spent in study. For the assistance of the staff at that collection as well as at the British Library, the Newberry Library, the Yale University Libraries, the Harvard Theatre Collection, and the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, I am forever grateful. Many people have either read my work or provided me with invaluable advice about the project. First amongst this group is the Folger Group, a scholarly collective devoted to women's writing and feminist concerns that I was fortunate enough to participate in and learn from when my ideas for this book were just forming. At the University of Pennsylvania, I benefited from the care and vision of Phyllis Rackin and Stuart Curran. Together they taught me how to be a scholar, a teacher, and a thinker. For reading my work and offering both useful comments and encouragement at various stages along the way, I extend my thanks to Toni Bowers, judith Kegan Gardiner, jean Howard, Susan Lanser, Deidre Lynch, jean Marsden, john Richetti, joseph Roach, Mary Beth Rose, and Laura Rosenthal. I am especially grateful to Kristina Straub, one of the readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press, who was able to capture the importance of this work better than I ever could. Also at the press, I want to thank my anonymous second reader as well as my editor Jerry Singerman for seeing this project through in such a timely fashion. For their remarkable kindness and generosity, I thank my friends, old and new, academic and nonacademic: Lisa Blansett, Sara Beasley, Jennifer Brody, Jill Campbell, Naomi Diamant, jody Greene, Sharon Holland, Nicole King, Debbie Nelson, and Alok Yadav. For the fact that this book got finished at all, I must thank Anne Cubilie, Jamie Owen Daniel, Andrea Henderson, Rene Lederman, and jon Rosner. Their friendship, their faith, and their love has meant the world to me; they have given me courage and kept me strong. There are some debts that can hardly be put into words; Blakey Vermeule thus remains in a category of her own. Finally, I want to thank my family for their love and support at all times and in all things: Laurie, Yoji, Evan, and Ken Shimizu; Jodie, Howard, Emma, Ben, and Sam Adler; Robert Freeman; and Philippa Smith. This book is dedicated to my parents, Jack and Ellen Freeman, whose love has ever been unconditional and sees me through each and every day. Earlier forms of portions of Chapter 3 appeared as "Whats Love Got to Do with Addison's Cato?" SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39 (1999): 46382 ; and "Tragic Flaws: Genre and Ideology in Lillo's The London Merchant," SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 539-61. 298 Acknowledgments ...

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