Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

acknowledgements

Writing a book about obligations necessarily involves the accumulation of new responsibilities, new debts, new obligations. Anyone who knows me well will know that Romantic Hospitality is indebted, first and foremost, to David L. Clark. A gifted scholar, the most giving of mentors, David continues to show me a generosity that far exceeds any possibility of restitution on my part. The irresistible pull of an inadequate economy of exchange nevertheless compels me to say to him, at the very least and with the deepest sincerity ,“thank you.” I am also compelled to thank a number of others who have helped, each in their own way, to make this book possible. They include Reeve Parker (for good conversation and the use of his office); Tilottama Rajan (for her encouragement and tough questions); Nicholas Halmi (for letters, references, and clearing up questions of translation); Grace Kehler and the late Sylvia Bowerbank (for asking me to think otherwise); Dana Hollander and Patrick J. Ryan (for their many helpful comments and suggestions); George Grinnell and Murray J. Evans (for always having ears to bend); Matt Kavanagh and Jake Kennedy (for much-needed rounds at Chedoke); the entire nassr community (for invaluable feedback over the years); the readers and editorial staff of the Wilfrid Laurier University Press (especially Jacqueline Larson, Rob Kohlmeier, and Margaret Crammond); and Mark Fortier, Neil Besner, and the University of Winnipeg (for giving me an extra year at Cornell). I should also like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose Doctoral vii J acknowledgements 00_intro 3/1/07 12:04 Page vii and Post-Doctoral Fellowships enabled me to complete much of the research for and writing of this book. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences , through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also thank the University of Winnipeg’s Board of Regents for providing funding for indexing and proofreading (and Amanda LeBlanc for actually doing the work). Portions of Romantic Hospitality were published previously as follows: a shorter version of chapter 1’s section on“The Sleepy Carib”appeared in European Romantic Review 13.2 (2002); the first two sections of chapter 2 were first published together in Timothy Morton’s Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); the third section of chapter 2 appeared in European Romantic Review 17.1 (2006); and chapter 3’s discussion of “Rime”first appeared as a short note in The Explicator 63.1 (2004). I thank the Taylor and Francis Group (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals), Palgrave Macmillan, and Heldref Publications for permitting me to reproduce these pieces in slightly altered form. For allowing me to reprint Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s“The Mouse’s Petition,”I thank Romantic Circles (http://www.rc .umd.edu) and the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta. Finally, on a more personal level, I would like to thank my friends and family , all of whom have shown me great kindness, understanding, and support in all aspects of my life. As always, special thanks go to Kerry Feeney for always believing in me and for making a home with me on the prairies. Romantic Hospitality is dedicated to her and, as Barbauld would say, to a little invisible being who is expected soon to become visible.
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