Acknowledgments

As most books do, Theory of Mind and Literature has accumulated a significant number of debts in the course of its development, not least because it has been a collaborative enterprise on several levels since its inception. The book emerges from the exciting interdisciplinary exchanges that took place at a conference of the same name at Purdue University at the end of 2007. Our first debt of gratitude is to the seventy participants in the conference who met over the course of four days to explore intently the importance of Theory of Mind in reading and understanding literature. The conversations, both formal and informal, were exciting, original, and always productive. Many of the essays submitted for consideration in this volume were reworked in light of insights culled from the conference.

Neither the conference, nor this book would have been possible without the unstinting moral and financial support of Purdue University, especially the College of Liberal Arts, under the direction of former Dean John Contreni; the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, under the direction of former Head Paul Dixon; and the Department of Psychological Sciences, under the direction of former Head Howard Weiss. We would also like to thank the following programs and departments for additional generous support: Classics, Film Studies, Jewish Studies, the Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies. We are extremely grateful to Howard Weiss and Christopher Agnew (former and current Head of the Department of Psychological Sciences, respectively) for subsidizing the preparation of the index, and to Tom Berndt (interim Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures) for additional support.

For permission to reprint the essays by Mark Turner and Lisa Zunshine, we are grateful to Oxford University Press and the British Academy, to Ohio State University Press, and especially to Ilona Roth for her assistance in reprinting Mark Turner’s essay. For careful reading and astute suggestions for revision, we are grateful to the reviewers of the individual essays and the book as a whole. Finally, we would like to thank Charles Watkinson, the Director of Purdue University Press, and the staff of Purdue University Press, especially Katherine Purple and Becki Corbin, for guiding this book patiently and expertly to publication.