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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s Though I have written a book claiming that books are often more our own than we acknowledge, this one really could not have been mine without the help and support of its first readers. Thanks to Adam Frank, Marguerite Pigeon , Martin Ryle, Kate Soper, Alexander Dick, Sandra Tomc, Nicholas Hudson , Mark Blackwell, Bruce Robbins, Adam Potkay, Miranda Burgess, Vin Nardizzi, Tilman Reitz, Joseph Chaves, Julie Park, Clifford Siskin, and Jonathan Lamb for taking the time to read, comment on, and talk about pieces from this project in their early stages. Sandy, Adam, and Alex have done this many times and I will always think of them with great warmth and gratitude in connection with this project. I had the good luck to write most of this book at the University of British Columbia, where all my colleagues and students made thinking a pleasure. In the later stages of the project, I have been just as lucky to encounter the collective and individual wisdom of those in the English Department at the University of Michigan. Sean Silver read and buoyed-up each of these chapters just as they were being finished, in the office right next door. Adela Pinch, Sara Blair, David Porter, Jonathan Freedman, Sarah Mesle, Jeffrey Knight, Zeynep Gürsel, HuiHui Hu, Danny Hack, Gillian White, Megan Sweeney, Elizabeth Wingrove, Lincoln Faller, Scotti Parrish, Marjorie Levinson, and Lucy Hartley all added to my ideas and made Ann Arbor a rich place to be. I am especially grateful to Adela, Marjorie, Lincoln, and Thomas Keymer for taking the time to read this manuscript for the first time as a whole, for the questions they asked, and for the assurance they gave at just the right time that it was a book. As a result of a manuscript workshop, all of them provided notes and ideas that have made their way directly into the chapters and saved me from many mistakes. Lynn Festa and an anonymous reader for Penn Press provided just the kind of instructive, insightful, and comprehending responses one dreams of receiving through years of writing. I’m sorry not to have done them full justice. And Christopher Flint generously agreed that we share our manuscripts at a late stage of copyediting, putting them into a conversation that they belong in together. 184 acknowledgments In the longer perspective, I would also to thank Myra Jehlen, Michael Warner, Michael McKeon and Nicholas Rennie, who were my teachers at Rutgers and who did such an excellent job of showing me how to think about eighteenth-century literature that I have been hanging in one way or another on their words ever since. If I was not the best of students at the time, it was only because I was impatient to know as much as they did; these days I accept that that would be difficult. This project has benefited directly from the generous financial support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. With this funding I was able to employ research assistants, Greg Morgan, Rose Casey, and Natalia Naish, who found some of the most important things in here. They will know which. While writing this book I was also the grateful recipient of fellowships at three wonderful institutions: the Chawton House library, the Huntington Library, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Without such practical support this book would quite literally not have been—long may such places and organizations exist in support of the humanities. Two of the chapters here appeared in earlier versions. Chapter 3 appeared as ““The Theory of Paper: Scepticism, Commonsense, Poststructuralism,” MLQ, 71, 4 (2010), copyright 2010, University of Washington; and Chapter 2 as “The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification in the Eighteenth Century,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 39, 3 (2006), Copyright 2006, Novel, Inc. Both of these are reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. I am grateful to those involved in editing and commenting on these articles, in particular to Marshall Brown who worked his special wonders on the MLQ piece. Portions of Chapter 4 appear as “Making a Writer for the Cleric’s Words,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2011), and I am grateful to the editors of this issue for organizing the conference that gave me the chance to try out the ideas from this chapter on such a good audience. It is...

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