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Acknowledgments It is a special pleasure to thank the friends and colleagues who provided insight and advice in the making of this book. I am deeply grateful to Lucia Re, whose advice and criticism inspired me throughout the project. I would also like to thank Tibor Wlassics and the colleagues at the University of Virginia for their friendship and support, and Marga Cottino-Jones and Jose Monle6n for their suggestions on the early stages of the manuscript. I am indebted to the editorial board of PSRL for having graciously accepted this study, and to Peter Carravetta and Mark Pietralunga for providing generous and constructive comments on my ideas. I also thank John Portman and Jennifer Haraguchi for their editorial and bibliographic work. I am grateful to the University of Virginia for the research grants that allowed me to fully dedicate myself to the completion of various chapters during the summer months. Early versions of parts of chapters 2 and 3 appeared, respectively, as "Historical Reconfigurations and the Ideology of Desire: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo," in The Italianist 14 (1994): 96-110, and as "Elsa Morante's La Storia: Fiction and Women's History ," in RLA 5 (1993): 194-99. To the editors of these journals I am obliged for their kind permission to incorporate the essays into this book. Finally, all my love goes to my husband, Mike Thrift, for his unfailing encouragement and invaluable editorial review of seemingly endless drafts of the manuscript, and to my son, Alexander, for sharing his first months of life with the book's final revisions. Without their devotion and joy, Plotting the Past would simply not exist. ix ...

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