Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments While the web of collaboration involved in a book like this is too intricate to be captured in a list, we would above all like to thank our contributors for entering so enthusiastically, creatively, and patiently into the spirit of an evolving project. They generously and energetically responded to all of our requests for further reflection and revision, first in drafting the essays based on their preliminary proposals and then in serially revising these essays to make them speak more fully to one another and to the aims of the collection as these unfolded. We, in turn, were led to modify and reframe many of the assumptions we began with in response to their illuminating scholarly work within a range of different historical fields. We would also like to thank the graduate students in our seminar on literary couples for some of the questions that first inspired this collection; our colleague Andy Wainwright for collaborative suggestions that led to the refining of our title; Patricia Clements, Holly Laird, and Susan Leonardi for insightful and constructive criticism as readers for the University of Wisconsin Press; and Sheilah Wilson and David Anderson for attentive and intelligent research and manuscript assistance. At a time when models of the “solitary researcher” still tend to prevail, even as granting agencies increasingly promote large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations , small-scale collaborative projects like this one tend to fall between the cracks of funding structures—and this one is no exception. However, we would like to thank the Department of English at Dalhousie University and the university’s Research Development Fund for timely support for research assistance, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support of some of the research out of which this project grew. Finally, we are grateful to Raphael Kadushin and Sheila Moermond of the Press for their expertise and patience. ix ...