It is a hard thing to know that this book’s first expression of gratitude is for someone who cannot read it: like so many others, I owe much to the intelligence and enthusiasm of Jay Fliegelman, who possessed the genius for taking so much pleasure in his students’ work that it was simply impossible for them not to keep on doing it. His gifts were abundant, and they were taken from us too soon. There was not a book or object he could not bring to scintillating, complicated life, and though the chapters that follow have little to say on any of the subjects his own scholarship transformed, I know for certain that they would not have been written without him. The guidance and teaching that filled my years as a graduate student at Stanford continue to surprise and educate me. David Halliburton saw this project in its earliest incarnations and enlarged its prospects with his deep originality and commitment to eccentricity. Albert Gelpi made sure that no matter how far I wandered, I always came back to my texts and the traditions that informed them. Marjorie Perloff’s energy and exacting sensibility convinced me that the reading we do as critics often does more justice when, as Frank O’Hara might say,“you just go on your nerve.” Scott Bukatman arrived in the nick of time and made it possible for me to break some rules that I otherwise would have followed to no good end.