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Acknowledgments This book has been seven years in the making and has gone through several incarnations. The English department of Vanderbilt University generously funded a year of relief from teaching, and the English department of the University of Tennessee provided me with a summer grant that enabled me to travel to libraries. Both institutions also provided supportive environments in which to complete the work. Several of my teachers, mentors, and former colleagues at Vanderbilt University read, commented upon, and gave other forms of guidance on this project at various stages: Thadious Davis, Teresa Goddu, Kurt Koenigsberger , Deandra Little, J. David Macey, Kevin Matthews, Eliza McGraw, Gary Richards, Sheila Smith-McKoy, and Eugene TeSelle. I owe a particular debt to Michael Kreyling, whose careful reading and direction of this project when it was still a dissertation were invaluable, and to the late Nancy Walker, whose intellectual generosity was always inspiring. I am equally grateful to my friends and colleagues at the University of Tennessee who provided close reading of chapters and savvy advice at a later stage of the project—above all, Amy Elias, Allison Ensor, Heather Hirschfeld, Chuck Maland, and Dorothy Scura. Conversations with fellow southern literary and cultural scholars elsewhere—including Deborah Cohn, Anne Goodwyn Jones, and Farrell O’Gorman—have also been valuable. The staffs of the special collections departments at the following libraries have been particularly helpful to me during the course of my research: the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University; the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Firestone Library at Princeton University; the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville, Tennessee; the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University; and the Local History and Genealogy Library in Mobile, Alabama. Bill Sumners at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives generously granted me permission to quote from The New Challenge of Home Missions by Eugene P. Alldredge. vii viii Acknowledgments I want to extend special thanks as well to Helen Tate, for permission to quote from Allen Tate’s unpublished letters; to Nancy Wood, for permission to quote from Caroline Gordon’s unpublished letters; and to Régine Latortue , for permission to quote from her translations of the poems of Les Cenelles . Two portions of this book have been previously published. A portion of Chapter  appeared in a slightly different form as ‘‘Contextualizing Flannery O’Connor: Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and the Catholic Turn in Southern Literature’’ in Southern Quarterly  (Fall ): –. A portion of Chapter  appeared in a slightly different form as ‘‘The ‘Nous’ of Southern Catholic Quadroons: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identity in Les Cenelles’’ in American Literature  (December ): –. I am grateful to both journals for permission to reprint these articles. I would also like to thank those at and associated with Fordham University Press who helped see this book into print, especially my readers, whose suggestions for revision were enormously helpful; Mindy Wilson, who provided thorough and meticulous copyediting; Chris Mohney, managing editor ; and Helen Tartar, editorial director. Finally I wish to thank my family: my parents, James and Margaret Haddox , and my sister, Katherine Jollit, for their love and moral support through the years. And the lion’s share of gratitude goes to my wife, Honor McKitrick Wallace, who has seen me through every crisis and without whose love, constructive criticism, and faith in me this book would never have been completed. ...

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