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Acknowledgments This study began with a grant from my unh English Department chair, the late Michael DePorte,to purchase books on consumer culture; they opened a whole new field of research to me. I am profoundly grateful for Mike’s recognition of this project’s promise and his faith in my ability to carry it through to the end. I am also grateful for the generous support of my unh colleagues, especially Rachel Trubowitz, who has always been ready, sometimes at a moment’s notice, to provide invaluable comments on a proposal, a chapter, or a possible revision. Douglas Lanier’s graduate seminar on the ceremonial culture of early modern England laid the groundwork for my understanding of the Catholic/Protestant debates over the sacraments and their implications. Sean Moore talked with me about the new economist criticism. Brigitte Bailey read through my entire first draft and reassured me of its worth. Siobhan Senier and Paula Salvio affirmed the link between my research and present-day issues of over-consumption and sustainability. Lisa MacFarlane, Tom Newkirk, Ruth Sample, Diane Freedman, David Watters, and Michael Ferber were an enthusiastic audience for my ideas; they never seemed to lose faith that someday a book would actually appear. My former students Sharon Kehl-Califano, Sally Hirsh-Dickinson, and Jason Williams enriched my graduate seminars and taught me much. And warm appreciation goes as well to the later chairs of my ­ department— ​­ Rochelle Lieber, Janet Aikins Yount, and Andrew Merton—for their patience with my sometimes slow progress. Along with my college deans, Marilyn Hoskin and Kenneth Fuld, they also kept faith that this book would someday be done, and in doing so they helped me keep my own. I am also grateful to Harry Richards and the unh Graduate School for a Summer Faculty Fellowship that gave me time to read those new books and jump-start my research. Burt Feintuch and the unh Center for the Humanities awarded me a Senior Faculty Fellowship that provided me a semester off to reframe my study at a critical moment. Bruce Mallory and the Office of the unh Provost named me a Faculty Scholar and freed me for another semester to complete the first draft.John Aber, as unh provost,gave final approval for this book’s publication.Even during difficult economic times, he continued to support the “Becoming Modern” series in which it appears. Lastly, Andrew Merton and the unh English Department generously supplied last-minute help with book production costs. I have been xii } Acknowledgments very lucky to have received such strong and understanding support from my home institution. I am grateful also for the recognition that has come from the larger scholarly community. June Howard and Carol Singley were early supporters of this project. Their appreciation of its larger implications meant a lot to me. They, along with my unh colleague Lisa MacFarlane, helped secure the fellowships that allowed me to complete the book. I owe them all a great deal. Hildegard Hoeller, Rohan McWilliam, Doug Goldstein, and Megan Marshall offered much appreciated support along the way. Nickianne Moody and Julia Hallam provided the first chance to take my ideas public when they accepted my paper on Little Women and consumer culture for their conference “Consumption: Fantasy, Success, and Desire” at Liverpool John Moore’s University in 1998. They later included this paper in their edited collection, Consuming Pleasures: Selected Essays on Popular Fictions (2000); it is reprinted here by their kind permission.A greatly expanded version of that essay,now chapter 1 of this book, was then accepted by Jack Salzman for Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies (2001). My thanks to him and to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint this material. I am also grateful to Derek Rubin and Hans Krabbendam for their acceptance of my paper “Religion, Consumer Culture, and the Body in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye”for their conference “Religion in America: European and American Perspectives.” Subsequently published in their 2004 collection of conference papers, this essay allowed me to address a more contemporary writer and to demonstrate how my analysis of consumer culture could illuminate the construction of racial difference and its human consequences . And finally, thanks to Robert Lamb and G. R. Thompson for their inclusion of my essay “Mapping the Culture of Abundance: Literary Narratives and Consumer Culture” in their 2005 Blackwell Companion to American Fiction , 1865–1914. They gave me a welcome opportunity to apply the analytical approach used...

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