I have been thinking about the topics discussed in Dandyism for a long time and have incurred many debts along the way. At Bard College, Deirdre d’Albertis’s course on Anglophone modernism planted the seed from which this book grew, and Nancy Leonard’s literary theory courses were formative. At Yale, coursework with Tanya Agathocleous, Jill Campbell, Wai Chee Dimock, Lanny Hammer, Pericles Lewis, Michael Warner, and Ruth Yeazell shaped the direction of my subsequent work. Anthony Reed alerted me to Lyotard’s book on dandyism. Paul Grimstad shared his sensitive responses to detective fiction and to William Burroughs. A visit to New Haven from Cathryn Setz taught me much of what I know about Djuna Barnes. I am especially grateful to Amy Hungerford and Katie Trumpener. Their breadth of knowledge, their commitment to argumentative clarity, and their personal encouragement were invaluable.
I can’t imagine having enjoyed graduate school more than with Maggie Deli, Anna Dubenko, Merve Emre, Sam Fallon, Edgar Garcia, Matt Hunter, Tom Koenigs, Tessie Prakas, Glyn Salton-Cox, Justin Sider, and Josh Stanley. I owe particular intellectual debts to Justin Sider, Merve Emre, and The Anchor.
At the Harvard Society of Fellows, I benefited particularly from conversation—often very late into the night—with Alex Bevilacqua, Michaela Bronstein, Stephanie Dick, Marta Figlerowicz, Abhishek Kaicker, Marika Knowles, Jed Lewinsohn, Hannah Walser, Moira Weigel, and Daniel Williams.
I have presented versions of this work at conferences sponsored by the Modernist Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the English departments at Indiana–Bloomington and UMass–Amherst, as well as at meetings of the Yale Americanist Colloquium and the Yale British Studies Colloquium. I would like to thank all involved. A compressed version of my second chapter appears as “The Dandified Dick: Hardboiled Noir and the Wildean Epigram” in ELH 81.4 (Winter 2014): 1299–1326, copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press; it is reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. A portion of my fourth chapter appears as “Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Decadent Style” in Literature Compass 11.6 (June 2014). And a shorter version of my third chapter appears as “Modernist Genre Decadence from H. G. Wells to William S. Burroughs” in Affirmations: of the modern 5.1 (Autumn 2017). At the JFK Library, Stephen Plotkin made visits to the Hemingway archive run smoothly. The University of Virginia Press’s anonymous readers were diligent, intelligent, and scrupulous; they improved the book immensely.
My family was never less than supportive. And Cori O’Keefe was always more than supportive, and still is.
I am deeply indebted to the late Sam See for his attentive reading of portions of this book in its very early phases, and for his friendship. I miss him.