- In the short term, watching the evidence (darned evidence!) blow up your original research project is, to say the least, frustrating. In the long term, however, it's much more interesting to discover that your materials don't conform to your assumptions than to discover that they do. Why study works that do exactly what you expect them to do? What is there to learn?
- Whenever I begin a project, I remind myself that literary history, like history in general, tends to be inconvenient.
- There's much more critical evaluation in literary history than you might expect; it's just that when it comes to tracing literary influence, genre development, cultural significance, and so forth, what now seems to be an obviously lousy book may be much more important than a good one--or even a great one. (Or, in some cases, what appeared at the time to be a lousy book...) For Victorianists, Bulwer-Lytton serves as a pretty aggravating case in point. See #2.
- Even cheap didactic fiction can be experimental, or, at least, do unexpected things. See #1.
- It's dangerous to assume that non-canonical works have actually vanished. Academics may not bother paying attention to them; other audiences, however, may take a very different view.
I found Dr. No's post about the unbearable heaviness of excessive citations just as I was putting some citations into Book Two (which, amazingly enough, is really, truly near completion). Ah, the irony. My own attempts to go forth naked into the world--by which I mean not citing irrelevant secondary sources--have, alas, been stymied by readers. "Why aren't there any references to these two books?" (Because...they have nothing to say about this topic?) "Where's the discussion of this theoretical approach to hard-boiled eggs?" (Nowhere, because I'm writing about turkey bacon.) I might as well just put the citations in now and expect to delete them later...
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