(p. v ) Acknowledgments

I completed this project while in residence as a senior fellow in the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame. While I spent most of my time there on a work that is still in progress, a book on belief and the language of place‐relations in modern English fiction, I was able from time to time to turn to this one. I also had opportunities to share parts of it with the other fellows, and I am grateful to them, especially to Roger Lundin, for their encouragement and help. I want to thank the administration of the institute, especially Professor Jim Turner, for providing me the opportunity to work there.

I showed parts of the manuscript to several people: Dr. Mary Smith and her husband, Professor Philip Rolnick, Mr. Brett Patterson, the late Professor Tommy Langford, Dr. Anastasia Gutting, and my daughter, Eva. I am grateful to them all for their interest in my work and for their many helpful responses to it. I am also grateful to Ms. Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press, who read the manuscript with care and offered many helpful suggestions and corrections.

Finally, I want to thank my wife, Phyllis, both for her interest in this project and for her help in my attempts to write in a way that would make the book available to a wide audience. (p. vi )