Acknowledgments

The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Acknowledgments

The ideas in this book were fostered at Indiana University, under the intelligent and generous guidance of Andrew H. Miller, Patrick Brantlinger, Deidre Lynch, and Janet Sorenson. There too, Purnima Bose and Eva Cherniavsky first sparked my interest in colonial and postcolonial issues in literature. And in teaching me to teach writing, Christine Farris and Kathy O. Smith taught me much I needed to know in order to write this book.

At Notre Dame I have been particularly indebted to the assistance and collegiality of Graham Hammill, Susan Harris, Susannah Monta, and John Sitter. Whether they realize it or not, David Wayne Thomas and Katherine Zieman made crucial interventions into this research. While she was chair, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s advocacy created the conditions under which it was possible for me to complete my manuscript. Chris Vanden Bossche’s contributions to this project, both administrative and intellectual, are unmatched by any colleague. I am grateful to Chris Fox, Maud Ellmann, Luke Gibbons, and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, whose faculty and visiting fellows have enriched my understanding of Ireland far beyond the nineteenth century. At the same time, the scholarship of graduate students Brook Cameron, Heather Edwards, Nathan Elliott, Benjamin Fischer, Jessica Hughes, Lara Karpenko, Maggie Nerio, and Teresa Huffman Traver made the nineteenth century a rich and enjoyable place to be.

During the writing of this book Sarah McKibben and Naunihal Singh provided daily support and encouragement. I benefited from the writing advice and box wine of Wendy Arons, Robert Goulding, Margaret Meserve, Emily Osborne, and Sophie White. I am grateful too for the long-distance encouragement of Kathy Psomiades. Jeanne Barker-Nunn, Ivan Kreilkamp, Todd Kuchta, Richard Higgins, Maureen Martin, and Nick Williams all provided me with useful advice during the final stages of the project. Mary Jean Corbett’s careful and knowledgeable review of this manuscript on behalf of the Johns Hopkins University Press proved indispensible. Matt McAdam has been the model of an efficient and responsive editor. I am grateful, too, for Glenn Perkins’s attention to this manuscript during copyediting. All errors remain my own.

Research for this book was funded in part by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Parts of chapter 1 have been reprinted from “Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth and the Illegitimacy of National Ownership” in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 44, no 4, © 2002 Wayne State University Press, with the kind permission of Wayne State University Press. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as “The Nation’s Wife: England’s Vicarious Enjoyment in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels,” in Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance, edited by Allan Hepburn, © 2007 University of Toronto Press, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the University of Toronto Press.

I would not be the sort of person who wrote academic books were it not for the high quality of my very first interlocutors—my parents, Larry and Sharon Maurer, who modeled for me an ethic of hard work and intellectual curiosity, and my siblings, Micheline Maurer, Laren Botello, Kierstin Maurer, and Travis Maurer, who kept me on my toes and kept me laughing. During the composition of this book I remained human due to the abundant friendship of Dana Baker, Aparna Balaji, Gail Bederman, Cara De la Cruz, Tina DeVries, Doug Dillaman, Amy Eldridge, Devasena Gnanashanmugam, Alexandra Guisinger, Michelle Harm, Julie Hiipakka, Suzanne Link Freeman, Joy Lewis, David Nickerson, and Irene Kim Park.

Don Fessenden provided, and continues to provide, unprecedented support both relevant to and far afield from book writing. I thank him for all the ways he contributed to making this book possible, but I know I owe him for so much more.

Finally, all thanks to the Creator, who broke the chains so I could lift my hands.