Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments xi The editors at Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures have been very helpful in shaping this manuscript into its final form. I would like to thank Susan Y. Clawson, production editor at PSRL, for her caring and perspicacious editing of this book. In the tradition of Maxwell Perkins, she took a rather disheveled manuscript and made sure it wasn’t too eccentric. I would also like to thank PSRL editors Allen G. Wood and Jeanette Beer for their confidence, sharpness, and patience in regards to my work, as well as the anonymous reviewers of PSRL, whose insightful readings of earlier drafts of The Sunday of Fiction steered me in the right direction. I am very grateful to my mentors from Columbia. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is certainly one of the best readers I know and she has been a constant source of encouragement and growth throughout my career. Henri Mitterand, Gita May, and Antoine Compagnon have inspired me and never let me down from my very first “baby steps” at Columbia. I am also indebted to Alice Yeager Kaplan, who was not only my mentor when I was an undergraduate at Columbia, but who also gave me the idea to write about eccentrics—a topic that will always be particularly meaningful to me. Similarly, I wish to thank Stephen Winspur for his advice and thoughtfulness. Many people have helped this project along the way. I am grateful to the French government for granting me a Chateaubriand Fellowship and to Pierre Etaix for his generosity and warmth when I was living in Paris as a doctoral student. I wish to thank Warren Motte and Jordan Stump for their support and guidance, as well as, at Old Dominion, Stephen and Michelle Foster, who have been particularly supportive and generous with their time and encouragement. I would like to express my gratitude to Dolly Weber for reading through my early manuscript with such care and friendship. I have been lucky enough to have many friends who have been particularly supportive during the different stages of this book and who should know how appreciative I am: Emmanuelle Berkovitz, Robert and Elaine Cohen, Betty-Rose Facer, Kerry Gluckmann, Terri J. Gordon, Lynn Kwit, Nicole Loireleux, FrederickA. Lubich, Lydia Mcneill, Bruno Queniart, Sarah Sasson, Heidi Schlipphacke, xii Acknowledgments Emma Skoble, Richard D. White, Diana Widom, Mischa and Nicole Zabotin. Finally, this project was made possible by years of support from Jean Alexander and Arnold Schulman. I could not have wished for a more supportive and wonderful family, nor can I imagine any future project without them. ...