Acknowledgments

I wrote this book while living and working on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississauga peoples, lands and waterways protected by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant. This agreement, codified between the Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee Confederacy, reminds all who live and visit here of our reciprocal responsibilities to care for the dish to ensure that its life-sustaining gifts are equally available to all beings who inhabit it. As I wrote this book in this place, I thought a lot about how to reorient my scholarly work away from the colonial capitalist framework of competitive “professionalism” and toward an anticolonial ethos of kinship and reciprocal care. This is an ongoing effort for me, and this book is one of the results of those efforts.

I have come to understand how profoundly any and all knowledge-work is generated collectively. It would be impossible to name here all of the people who contributed to the thoughts gathered in this book. Please know that if you recognize yourself here, then you are here and I am immensely grateful for your presence.

I thank in particular all of the students with whom I’ve spent time during the writing of this book. There are so many of you, because I spent more than ten years working on this thing, and I’ve learned so much from thinking with you.

While I worked on this book, I was invited to present material from at a number of gatherings, including the Columbia Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture; the University of York Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies Research Seminar; the University of East Anglia Research Seminar; the Columbia Graduate Colloquium for Eighteenth-Century Studies; the British Women Writers Conference; the David Nichol Smith Seminar; the Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies; the Race, Power, & Poetics Series at University College, London; the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute; the Penn State Comparative Literature Luncheon Series; and the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Thank you to everyone who welcomed me into these spaces and grew these ideas with me. Thanks also to all my colleagues at McMaster University, who sustain me in this work every day.

Enormous thanks to everyone at Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library, where I was a visiting fellow in 2018. In particular, Nicole Bouché, Susan Walker, Cynthia Roman, Michelle Privée, Scott Poglitsch, and Kristen McDonald have made me feel at home in this community and helped bring me to many of the materials contained in this book. Thanks also to all the librarians who assisted me at the British Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University, my home institution. Thanks to all librarians, period. Let us protect libraries, and public access to them, with our lives.

The research for this book was also supported by an Insight Grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). These funds allowed me to travel and to support several brilliant research assistants, including Emily West, Roshaya Rodness, and Stacy Creech de Castro. Emily and Stacy have been especially important interlocutors for me over the years I have worked with them, and I cannot recommend their scholarship highly enough.

The book could not have arrived in its final form without the dedicated labors of several extraordinary editorial teams. Thank you, from the depths of my heart, to Eleanor Collins, Jacqueline Norton, and Bethany Thomas for treating me and my work with such expert care. Where would we be without editors? Nowhere good. Thanks, also, to Liz Davey and the production team at Cambridge University Press for bringing it all together so beautifully, despite my perpetual failure to meet deadlines.

Material from Part 3 was published in an earlier form as “Evelina’s Laughter: The Novel’s Queerer Theories” in The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation (special issue on “The Novel as Theory,” ed. Kathleen Lubey and Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, vol. 62, no. 2 [2020]: 165–86; copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press), and is reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Thank you to all the anonymous peer reviewers who have contributed to the growth of this project through your generous engagement and feedback. Thank you to Lori Langille for the incredible cover art. Thank you to Tanya Izzard for creating the index—pure wizardry, as far as I am concerned. Thank you to Gavin Rees for compiling the bibliography. Thank you to Michelle Nussey for help with proofreading, among all the other things.

Obviously, I would not have survived the years I spent writing this book without my collectives and group chats. Eternal gratitude to my Bigger 6 crew, especially Manu Samriti Chander, Tricia Matthew, and Nikki Hessell, with whom I am proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder as we face the world. And to the “Asian Provocation” contingent of ASECS, especially Travis Chi Wing Lau and Mona Narain, for your steady care and solidarity. And to Tita Chico, Nush Powell, and Laura Stevens, for a group chat that supplies love and snark in perfect proportion. And to my beloved Strawberry crew—Emily West, Freya Gowrley, and Caroline Gonda—with whom I will meet up at Walpole’s house any time. And to the Couch Walruses, including Miriam Novick, for keeping me defiantly afloat on the roughest seas. And to my sister founders of the New Dumb Girl Studies—Stephanie Insley Hershinow, Kasia Bartoszyńska, and Kathy Lubey—who have shown me how life-giving it is to have really smart friends with whom you can be your whole ridiculous self. I am especially grateful to Kathy, my eighteenth-century studies work wife going on two decades now. I can’t imagine what my career would look like without her, and I don’t want to.

I extend special thanks to Jacqueline Langille, with whom I edited Eighteenth-Century Fiction for fifteen years. Over that time, Jackie taught me more than I can describe about the importance of journals, about the communities they foster, and about collaborative knowledge production in general. Our editorial partnership made all aspects of my academic work possible, including the writing of this book.

Over the years I worked on this book, several members of my family became ancestors, including my dad, Gregory Zuroski; my grandmother, Ruby Yuan; and my grandfather, George Huan Yu Yuan. I am never not thinking with them. My Grandma Ruby was instrumental in helping me research the significance of the Three Friends of Winter motif, which she described in an email to me as “The Three Amigos.” My family is full of brilliant, funny people, especially my sisters, Kathryn Zuroski and Emma Zuroski, and my mom, Patricia Zuroski. I finished drafting this book while on a writing retreat with my mom—a utopian interlude in a difficult year.

And to my innermost pack, Derek Jenkins, Ruby Zuroski-Jenkins, Dumpling, and the prevailing animal spirit of Daisy Mae: Thank you for helping me fill our house with books and toys; for keeping me on my toes in the most loving, most joyful ways imaginable; and for making it possible for me to read and write as much as I do. I believe that love is a practice, but with you it feels as natural as breathing. Thank you, my loves, for making it all so fun.