| At every stage in the making of this book I have been the beneficiary of wise counsel and generous assistance. And however well or ill-disposed my benefactors may be to public acknowledgment of their contributionwhether admonitory, cautionary, instigatory, editorial, or administrativeto the product before you, it is now my pleasant task to name names, to identify my witting and unwitting accomplices and confederates. To them every reader is indebted, for without their persistent efforts this work would have been at once more corpulent and less fit for public trials. If this text still pants and sweats occasionally, the incorrigibility of the recruit, not the regimen of the drill instructors, is to be faulted. Without further ceremony, then, I proceed to my "without whoms." |
| To the Trustees of the Ohio State University, the members of the Research Committees of the Graduate School and the College of Humanities (and especially to the Dean of the College, Michael Riley), I am, in the language of understatement, more than a little grateful for the invaluable gifts of financial assistance and released time from teaching. My colleagues, Mark Conroy and Walter Davis, gave the fledgling manuscript just what it needed, just at the moment of need: tough reading and strong encouragement. Also, when the text required special care and attentionwhen, that is, index, bibliography, and final copy had to be just right, just now, and somewhere else no later than yesterdayI was fortunate to have the remarkably intelligent and wonderfully efficient assistance of Natalie Tyler (who served ably as reader and critic as well as bibliographer extraordinaire), David Sims, and Gareth Euridge. Also, I have been especially fortunate in finding at the University of Pennsylvania Press editors who were boundless in their patience, generosity, and kindness, and who in innumerable ways made smooth what was rugged in my |
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