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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments I genuinely appreciate a number of people who have been so important in my personal and professional life over the past decade or so and who thereby supported my writing of this book. I am especially grateful to Kenneth Kidd at the University of Florida and Steve Kruger at the City University of New York Graduate Center, who have both put in untold time and effort reading and responding to my work, fielding my endless questions, facilitating my progress, promoting my success, and alleviating my anxieties. They have been generous, kind, and supportive teachers and friends. I admire and respect them immensely, and I know I owe a considerable debt to them both. I want to thank Scot Danforth at the University of Tennessee Press for supporting my book and shepherding it through publication. I am grateful for his attentiveness, his patience, and his speedy correspondence. I also want to thank Stan Ivester, Monica Phillips, and the anonymous reader for the University of Tennessee Press, who read the manuscript quickly and provided helpful suggestions. Michael Mays, my department chair, provided me with some release time to work on this project and some invaluable advice on publishing. Thank you. I am also grateful to Philip Kolin, who provided much needed advice on navigating the publishing process, and to my colleagues at the University of Southern Mississippi who have been supportive of me and of my work, especially Stan Hauer. I want to thank my Ph.D. committee at the City University of New York Graduate Center: Steve Kruger, my chair; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose work has played a significant role in shaping my scholarship and inspiring me personally; and Marc Dolan, who graciously agreed to serve as a reader. I can’t thank them enough. During my time in New York City I was fortunate to have a number of wonderful colleagues and friends in the English Department at Queens College: Carrie Hintz, Duncan, Faherty, John Weir, and Glenn Burger all offered advice or otherwise provided me with personal or professional support. I want to thank the friendly and encouraging folks at the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) for creating such a warm and welcoming environment x Acknowledgments viii for young scholars. Attending my first ChLA convention finally convinced me to focus on children’s literature. I especially want thank those I met the first couple of years I came to the ChLA meeting for being kind to an anonymous graduate student. Lori Cohoon, June Cummins, Leona Fisher, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Jerry Griswold, Mavis Reimer, Lee Talley, and Laureen Tedesco stick out in my mind, but I’m sure I’m overlooking many others. I want to offer a special thanks to Richard Flynn, who has been particularly helpful, generous, and encouraging. I remain intellectually indebted to the English Department at the University of Florida for shaping my thinking and career. I still draw on the ideas, books, and methods to which I was introduced there, so while it might be unconventional to reach so far back, and while many of the following faculty might not remember me, I want to offer my belated thanks to Alistair Duckworth, who introduced me to Jane Austen and E. M. Forster; Pamela Gilbert, who taught me about feminist theory and Victorian literature and whom I continue to admire; Anne Goodwyn Jones, who directed my study of masculinity theory and encouraged my intellectual creativity; Brandon Kershner, whose class introduced me to cultural studies; James Paxson, who first explained to me how to do psychoanalytic criticism; John Perlette, who introduced me to gender studies and the work of Eve Sedgwick; Robert Ray, whose class on theory and the profession was a formative experience for me; and John Seelye, whose course on adventure and domesticity still informs my own teaching. I especially want to thank Kim Emery, with whom I took my first courses in gay and lesbian literature and queer theory, and in whose class the idea for this book was first born. No doubt this would have been a very different project without her classes or her comments on the seminar paper that formed the kernel of this book. Her suggestion that I talk about my work with her friend Kenneth Kidd was also fateful. I have long imagined thanking the following friends in my acknowledgments : Maya Dodd, Emily Garcia, Meg Norcia, and Nishant Shahani—for their friendship, for all of our adventures and travels together, for the endless and anxious discussions we’ve...