Hit delete

I've spent part of this evening reworking an article for its second life as chapter one of Book Two.  Besides deleting a good chunk of the introduction (hey, look, the chapter just got shorter) and upgrading some of the primary sources (whoops, it just got longer again), I also took special pleasure in knocking out a paragraph that came to be solely because a reader demanded that I cite theorists X, Y, and Z. 

ME: But X, Y, and Z illuminate nothing in this article.  Zero! Zip! Zilch!   X even read a draft of this article and noted that my arguments and his did not cross paths!  Grumble, gripe, grouse.

RESULT: A paragraph citing X, Y, and Z, followed by the observation that the phenomena observed by X, Y, and Z did not manifest themselves in the novels under discussion.  End of references to X, Y, and Z. 

As I've mentioned before, theoretical work grounded in the canon does not necessarily translate well to, say, religious pop fiction.  My novelists do not always share agendas--intellectual or formal--with Dickens or Thackeray, let alone James or Pater.   It's possible that I may mention X or Z, if not Y, elsewhere in the chapter, but their work charts a historical path that doesn't intersect at all with what these non-canonical novelists are doing.