The contributors to this volume took their inspiration from Ross Shideler's extensive and diverse body of work, and particularly from Professor Shideler's volume, Questioning the Father: From Darwin to Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg and Hardy (Stanford University Press, 1999). The essays in this collection deal with father figures-biological, literary, intellectual, and cultural-as well as the gender challenges that they invoke and the gender identities that they help to shape. These essays are meant both to question father figures of all kinds and to honor the father figure that Ross Shideler has come to represent to generations of his students and colleagues.