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Acknowledgments
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ac k now l e d g m e n t s Despite heroic visions of the author working alone in a musty garret or the distilled silence of a library, all books are the products of a communal labor. My keen awareness of how many acts of generosity, faith, hospitality, and labor of all sorts have gone into the making of this book has sustained and driven me as I have worked on it over the years. A sense of this communal investment has brightened many a lonely hour of work while also creating some anxiety that any book could ever prove worthy of all the kindness and sacrifice that helped bring it to fruition. I am fortunate that there is no accounting method that can reveal how extensive my debt is to so many. The earliest ideas for this project took root in the rather disparate spaces of Tipperary, Los Angeles, and Dublin and came to fruition in the equally disparate climes of Nevada, Oregon, Galway, and California . In Tipperary, my uncle Rodge’s warm “Welcome Home” always made me feel like I had never left, and as we sat and talked by the fire I learned more than he may have ever realized. His insightful analysis of Irish and world affairs delivered with a masterstroke of wit in the brief moment he stopped to relight his pipe provided early examples of critical acuity and linguistic compression that were a continuing inspiration and challenge as I strove to find a language for my own ideas. His only rival was our cousin John Joe Quigley, whose gentle teasing and virtuosic turns of phrase always kept me on my toes and who, with his wife, Mary, extended a rich hospitality to me more times than I can count as I worked on this book. My cousins Maura and Tony and my oldest friend, Michael Gleeson, and his wife, Marion , have likewise made me welcome on many nights and helped me realize how the deepest connections endure amid all of the dislocations of contemporary life. Acknowledgments x At UCLA and many late nights across the City of Angels, Tracy Curtis, Dave Martinez, Danise Kimball, Mike Miller, Genaro Sandoval , Theresa Delgadillo, Dave Kamper, Tarik Abdul-Wahid, Jim Lee, Edwin Hill, Joanna Brooks, and Mo Lee supported me through good times and bad and kept me thinking and laughing all the way. Val Smith was an especially important source of inspiration and guidance while Joseph Nagy, Cal Bedient, and Joel Aberbach were continually generous in sharing their expertise and time. William Prescott provided me the benefit of his clarifying wisdom, and Saul Friedlander provided generous advice and timely encouragement, the significance of which I’m sure he never knew. Wendy Belcher has been a faithful friend whose consistently perceptive comments played a key role in helping me to focus the argument of this book. Carole Fabricant likewise sustained me with her unstinting support and sharp wit and taught me much by her example of a rigorous and committed scholarship. I was extremely fortunate to be a part of the Notre Dame Irish Seminar over three summers in Dublin, where I was the beneficiary of the kindness of Chris Fox and the immense intellectual hospitality of Kevin Whelan, Luke Gibbons, and Seamus Deane. It is hard to overstate the richness and vitality of the intellectual community they created during those summers or to credit adequately the influence it has had on my thinking about modernism and postcolonial Irish writing as a result of the conversations in and around the seminar and those that have continued over the years since. I am especially grateful to Luke Gibbons and Kevin Whelan for the ways they shaped some of my initial thoughts about the Blasket texts. I am equally thankful to Joe Cleary for the ongoing exchanges we have had about Sean O’Faoláin’s intellectual politics and to Conor McCarthy, Heather Laird, and Kariann Yokota for sharing their warm fellowship and thoughtful insights as we have sustained the conversation across the years and miles. One of the greatest pleasures of regularly visiting Dublin was the opportunity it afforded to spend time with my aunt Constance. She was the person who first stoked my love of literature, and her encyclopedic knowledge of Dublin and of the succession of its twentiethcentury cultural and social “scenes” has been an invaluable resource. Her willingness to throw open her house to me and to offer her support in every conceivable...