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Acknowledgments ix This book was made possible by generous support from a variety of sources. The project had its origins in a bibliographic study of late imperial xiaopin wen essays, which was funded by an Enders Collaborative Research Grant from the Yale University Graduate School and the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures that I shared with my student Glenn Perkins in 1999. Subsequent research in China was supported with grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies. A Senior Faculty Fellowship, also from Yale University, enabled me to relocate to Beijing for the academic year in 2003–2004 and focus all my attention on research and writing; additional research costs during that year were supported by funding from Yale’s Center for International and Areas Studies and an A. Whitney Griswold Grant for Faculty Research from Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Most of the materials I needed for this study were available to me at Yale University Libraries’ East Asian Collection, but I have also benefited greatly from access to the Harvard-Yenching Library at Harvard University, the Shanghai Municipal Library, the National Library of China in Beijing, the research collection of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute for Literary Studies, and the library of the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, also in Beijing. My heartfelt thanks go to the helpful staff of all these institutions . More importantly, there are many people who contributed advice, guidance , and support over the many years of this project. I would like first to recognize the graduate students who have taken my seminars at Yale University, whose own research and response to my ideas helped inspire and shape this book. Particularly deserving of credit here is Alexandra Wagner, whose 2002 dissertation was devoted to a major subgenre of the modern Chinese literary essay, the essay of place. Other students whose ideas and enthusiasm have left their mark on this study are Glenn Perkins, Christopher Swarat, Tinling Choong, Liu Haoming, and Frederik Green. Secondly, many distinguished scholars around the world have offered me their advice and valuable comments on chapter drafts, talks, and conference presentations. Among those who have in the past and continue to advise me, C. T. Hsia, David Der-wei Wang, and Rey Chow deserve particular mention. I have also received valuable suggestions from Peter Bol, Theodore Huters, Michelle Yeh, Perry Link, Ozaki Fumiaki, and conversations with colleagues at Yale such as Kang-i Sun Chang, Haun Saussy, Kang Zhengguo, Christopher Hill, and John Treat. In China I had the privilege of working with Chen Pingyuan and Wen Rumin of Beijing University’s Chinese department, as well as Wang Xiaoming, Chen Zishan, Ni Wenjian, and Luo Gang of East China Normal University in Shanghai and Shanghai University in the summer of 2001, Pan Songde of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute for Literary Studies in the summer of 2002, Chen Xiaoming, Yang Yi and other researchers of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute for Literary Studies in 2003–2004. I was also pleased to work with the independent scholar Zhi An, whose painstaking compilation and publication of materials on Zhou Zuoren and his circle is a model for academic publishing in China. Especially valuable to me is the interaction I have had over the years at conferences and individually with those most actively engaged in the study of modern Chinese literature and related fields, including Michel Hockx, Nicole Huang, Carlos Rojas,Yomi Braester, Megan Ferry, Kirk Denton, Sabina Knight, Amy Dooling, Mary Scoggin, and Stephen Day. Anonymous readers for University of Hawai‘i Press provided tremendous assistance in improving the manuscript, and I also greatly appreciate the support and encouragement I have received from Acquiring Editor Pamela Kelley, and the terrific copyediting work done by Terre Fisher. Finally, I would especially like to thank my wife, Ma Lan, and daughter, Lei, for continually spurring me on in this project, even though it took so much of my time and energy away from them for so many years. x Acknowledgments ...

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