Many friends and colleagues helped me greatly with this book, often more – or in more obscure ways – than perhaps they realized or than I was able to tell them at the time. I am particularly grateful to my colleague Robert Eaglestone, whose knowledge of Levinas – more expert than my own – was invaluable to me; who read much of the book, and provided me with a fund of useful comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful to others who found time to read and offered such illuminating responses to individual chapters: Alain Badiou, Steve Connor, Drucilla Cornell, Simon Critchley, Tom Docherty, Jonathan Dollimore, Patricia Duncker, Elaine Ho, Nick Royle and Yoshiki Tajiri. Many other people gave me needed advice or helped in conversation or in other ways, including Laura Chrisman, Martin Dzelzainis, Peter Hallward, Robert Hampson, Eddie Hughes, Luce Irigaray, Betty Jay, Laura Marcus, Jamie Russell and Kiernan Ryan.
Parts of this book were first given as papers at the twenty-first International Conference of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) at the University of Kent, 1995; at the third ESSE Conference, University of Glasgow, 1995; to the Samuel Beckett postgraduate seminar, University of Reading, 1996–98; to the Graduate Colloquium in English at the University of Sussex, 1996; at the ‘Literature and Ethics’ conference at the University of Aberystwyth, 1996; at the conference on ‘Contesting Conservatism: Jane Austen and the Ethics of Modernity’ at the London University Centre for English Studies, 1996; to the graduate seminar at the Institut d’Etudes Anglaises et Nord-Américaines, Université de Paris-Sorbonne IV, 1996; to the English department postgraduate seminar at University College London, 1997; to the research seminar in English at the University of Kent, 1997; and to the research seminar in the English Department at Royal Holloway, 1998. I am grateful to Hugh Epstein, Monika Fludernik, John Pilling, Ian Littlewood, Tony Inglis, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods, Andrew Hadfield, Mary Evans, François Gallix, René Weis, Tim Armstrong and others who made these presentations possible; and to all those whose responses to and questions about what I had to say were so useful to the development of the book, especially Richard Brown, Wolfgang Wicht, Janet Montefiore, Judith Hawley and John Deamer. My thanks, too, to Talia Rogers, Jason Arthur, Caroline Cautley and Elizabeth Jones at Routledge for their zest, enthusiasm and commitment to and hard work on this project.