So many individuals and institutions have contributed to this book that I cannot name them all. Joseph Dane has always been a source of knowledge and a stimulating, thoughtful reader of just about everything I have written. Brian Stock has long guided my sense of historical inquiry. Conversations with Timothy Hampton helped me formulate the shape of this book, while R. Howard Bloch, John Ganim, Anthony Grafton, Nicholas Howe, and David Wallace have, at various times, helped me see the implications of its claims. Specific contributions to my work were also made by Brett Bourbon, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Nicholas Jenkins, Gavin Jones, Coppélia Kahn, Herbert Lindenberger, Stephen Orgel, Marjorie Perloff, Jennifer Summit, Roland Greene, and Alex Woloch.
Portions of this book were read at Berkeley, Brown, Columbia, Fordham, the Huntington Library, California State University at Long Beach, the University of Miami, the University of Oregon, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Stanford, the University of Texas, the University of Toronto, Vanderbilt University, Yale, York University, and at meetings of the Modern Language Association of America.
Present and former students who have helped with this material include Dorsey Armstrong, Bradin Cormack, Karen Gross, Ryan Johnson, Meg Worley, and especially Deanne Williams.
Stanford University funded several leaves of absence and hosted a conference on Erich Auerbach in 1992, out of which my work on Mimesis and émigré philology developed. A fellowship year at the Stanford Humanities Center (2000–2001) and a summer fellowship at the Huntington Library (2001) enabled me to finish the book. I also thank the staffs at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the libraries at Berkeley, Princeton, and Stanford.
I am also grateful to David Kastan and James Shapiro for sponsoring a visit to Columbia and for putting me in contact with Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press, who generously welcomed this book for publication and who has proven to be an insightful and patient editor.
Portions of this book have previously appeared in print. Chapter 2 incorporates some material from a much longer and detailed treatment of George Hickes, “The Anglo-Saxon Pindar: Old English Scholarship and Augustan Criticism in George Hickes’s Thesaurus,” Modern Philology 99 (2001): 26–65. That chapter also includes, in revised and self-critical form, sections of my “Beowulf and Critical Theory,” in A “Beowulf” Handbook, ed. Robert Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Chapter 5 revises and expands material originally published as “Making Mimesis: Erich Auerbach and the Institutions of Medieval Studies,” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and R. Howard Bloch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), a different version of which was also published as the introduction and “Philology and Collaboration,” in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–10, 78–91. The epilogue is an expanded and annotated revision of my essay “Forbidden Planet and the Terrors of Philology,” Raritan 19 (2000): 73–86. I am grateful to the original editors and publishers for permission to incorporate these earlier materials into this book.
Finally, I have sought to quote accurately from my sources. No texts are normalized. Spelling, capitalization, punctuation, syntax, and phrasing remain (unless otherwise noted) as they appear in the originals, except that single quotation marks have been changed to doubles where appropriate (and vice versa). All unattributed translations are my own—as are, of course, all errors.