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Cagidemetrio, my long-time teacher and mentor and, in more recent years, my dean at Venice University, who has always believed in me. She has been unfailingly generous with her time, advice, and support. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, who has followed me from the very beginning, has been a vivid example of intellectual curiosity and competence. My colleagues, Francesca Bisutti De Riz and Daniela Ciani Forza, have always been supportive of my work and encouraging in myriad ways. They generously welcomed my first two attempts at tackling Roth’s novels in two collected works. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce in different form some portions of those two first articles. I owe a large debt to them all, well beyond their academic and scientific support.
Thanks are also due to Werner Sollors, who helped me to think about my project in book terms, and to Cristina Giorcelli, who has followed me at a distance, allowing me to test some of my ideas on a panel at the IASA conference held in Lisbon in 2007 and who later published that presentation in article form.
All the members of the Philip Roth Society I met at the ALA conference in San Francisco in 2010 were very generous with me in sharing their thoughts through many helpful conversations.
The most special thanks go to my family. To my husband, Luca, and my children, Giampaolo and Bianca, for reminding me that novels are not just narratological matters and that reading and storytelling are the very stuff our lives are made of.