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Acknowledgments This work was originally conceived in the mid 1990s, when I found myself in Central Europe teaching a variety of courses on contemporary American literature. My students and I were surprised to encounter so many ghosts in the writing we considered and were spurred to begin a shared inquiry into the presence of ghosts in American novels. My first and most heartfelt thanks is to all of my students—at Masaryk University in Brno, Charles University in Prague, Comenius University in Bratislava, Central European University and Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, Oklahoma State University, the University of Silesia in Sosnoweic, Poland, and, most recently, at York University in Toronto—for their generosity, patience, enthusiasm, and persistence , as well as for the wealth of their intellectual insight. Over the years and in the various countries, more friends and colleagues than I can mention here have also shared their ears and their ideas. In particular, let me thank Bill Decker and Elizabeth Grubgeld, most stalwart of friends and readers ; Tatiani Rapatzikou, collaborator, friend, and mentor; Marcus Grandinetti , whose forays into the field have been inspirational to me and who has pointed me to so many of the critical sources consulted herein; Jared Morrow , who has proven more industrious and able a research assistant than I could possibly have ever hoped for; Dan Waterman, editor-in-chief of the University of Alabama Press, who has been enthusiastic about the project from the start; the anonymous readers at Alabama who have been generous in their appraisals and whip-smart in their criticisms; Joan Redding, for her proofreading and for all other things; and Natallia Barykina, to whom I owe an incalculable debt for her smarts and her patient indulgence and understanding . Publication is supported in part by funds from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University. For this generous assistance , let me thank in particular Associate Dean Barbara Crow. Much of xii Acknowledgments what passes muster herein is due to all of these people and more. Needless to say, all errors and omissions are my own. I should thank as well the staff and colleagues in the Department of English at York University, who have been willing to forgive occasional administrative lapses on my part as I put the finishing touches to this manuscript. An earlier version of what now constitutes part of the second chapter and a small portion of the introduction was first published as “‘Haints’: American Ghosts, Ethnic Memory and Contemporary Fiction,” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 34.4 (December 2001): 163–182. A section of chapter 3 was published as “Abandoning Hope in American Fiction of the 1980s: Catalogues of Gothic Catastrophe” in Gramma 16 (2008): 273–289. I am grateful to Mosaic and to Gramma for permission to republish this work. Other portions of this work have been delivered as presentations at various venues, including the Association for Cultural Studies Crossroads Conference in Kingston, Jamaica, July 2008; the Cultural Studies Colloquium of the University of New Mexico, May 2001; the Conference on Minority Discourses in a Cross-/Transcultural Perspective: Eastern/Central Europe and Canada in Ustron, Poland, April 2002; the Southwest Popular Culture Association Convention in Albuquerque, February 2000; and the April Conference VII at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, March 1996. Haints ...

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