This book represents a sustained commitment to thinking and writing over several years during which I received invaluable support from others. First, the book would not have been possible without the unwavering patience, wisdom, and encouragement of my mentor, Cary Wolfe, who did not leave me “to twist in the wind.” His intellectual generosity, his friendship, and his belief in this project are gifts for which I remain humbled and deeply grateful.
I wish to acknowledge the institutional support of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown in their funding of several research activities at which I received important feedback for the completion of this project. This is especially true of my fellowship at the 2005 School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, where I was privileged to study with Elizabeth Grosz. I am very grateful for her reading of parts of this book, for her recognition of its value, and for her entreaty to keep working.
For the sometimes intangible but nonetheless essential support that academics need in their personal and professional lives, in their thinking and creating, I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of friends and colleagues. For their immeasurable role in this particular journey, I offer my thanks to Karen Carcia, Catherine S. Cox, Kristin Czarnecki, Kristin Lyndal Garbarino, Alessandra Lynch, David Magill, Tresa McVicker, Christine O’Connor, Maria-Cristina Saavedra, and, especially, Bryn Weller. My profound thanks to my mother, Sandy Rohman, for her truly unconditional love, to my brothers, Lance, Grant, and Clayton Rohman, and to my beloved late father, Dan Rohman, all of whom I am honored to call family. Thanks to Dale Gilmore for his early example of living deliberately and thinking expansively; he continues to inspire. And finally, for my husband, Ernie Cascino, whose love and devotion are astonishing—my deepest and most joyful thanks.
I wish to gratefully acknowledge permission from the following publications to reproduce my work and from the following institutions to reproduce the work of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence:
A segment of chapter 2 (on The Plumed Serpent) originally appeared in D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl G. Ingersoll (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).
A portion of chapter 3 (on The Island of Dr. Moreau) originally appeared in Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, ed. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Chapter 5 originally appeared as “Revising the Human: Silence, Being, and the Question of the Animal in Nightwood” in American Literature 79, no. 1 (March 2007): 57–84. Used with permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.
“Snake” by D. H. Lawrence, “Fish” by D. H. Lawrence, from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence by D. H. Lawrence, ed. V. Sola Pinto and F. W. Roberts, copyright ©1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
“Burbank with a Baideker” by T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Agonistes” by T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” by T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Erect” by T. S. Eliot, from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1963, Harcourt, Inc. and Faber & Faber Ltd.