In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xix s Acknowledgments Most of the work on this book was made possible by a two-year research grant from the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong University Grants Committee. I am most grateful to the UGC for the grant and to the anonymous readers of the GRF proposal for their suggestions. During 2009 the University of Bologna and the Chinese University of Hong Kong kindly granted me, respectively, a senior research fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies and a period of research leave to work on the book. A much earlier version of chapter 2 was published in The Critical Review, no. 31. I am grateful to the editor, Richard Lansdown, for his permission to use some of this material. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as a chapter in English Now in 2008. My thanks to Marianne Thormahlen, the editor of the book, for permission to publish this revised version. Versions of various parts of the book were presented as papers at the IAUPE Conference in Lund, 2007; at the conference “Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance” held by the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia, 2011; and at seminars at the University of Hong Kong (2010), Princeton University (2010), and the University of Utrecht (2011). I am grateful for (and often felt chastened by) the range and breadth of the suggestions made on these occasions. Thanks also to staff at the Bodleian Library and at the libraries of the University of Bologna, the Australian National University, and the s xx Acknowledgments Chinese University of Hong Kong, for their advice and help. As the general editor of this series, Stephen Prickett read through the whole manuscript and made many crucial suggestions. So too did the reader for Baylor University Press. I am deeply grateful to both. The book’s numerous remaining flaws are entirely my responsibility, needless to say. I would also like to thank both Stephen and Richard for many years of support, encouragement, and friendship. I am grateful for the friendship and intellectual companionship of my colleagues in the English Department at CUHK and the School of Humanities at ANU, and of many others elsewhere, including Jane Adamson, Serena Baiesi, Will Christie, Lilla Crisafulli, Keir Elam, Richard Freadman, John Gillies , Chris Miller, Anna Molan and Marianne Thormahlen. Especial thanks to Fred Langman, who has been thinking about Words­ worth for far longer than I, and who first inspired me to try to write about him—indeed to read English literature at university to begin with. I, like many others, owe him a great deal. Also warm thanks to David Parker, for so many entirely congenial conversations on so many subjects over so many years: and for the opportunities he has given me. ...

Share