Is there a canonical text in this book?
Dr. Crazy comments on "the necessity of framing one's work as a scholar in ways that will be marketable and in ways that fit into the demands of the economy of the academy":
Sometimes that necessity is at odds with our politics (for example: while it is a valuable feminist project to write on less canonical women authors, most departments aren't looking to hire a specialist in Esoteric Woman Writer, nor are most journals looking to publish articles on her) or at odds with our beliefs about what "scholarship" should be (that it should somehow be "pure" and outside of what is often an oppressive market-driven structure). The trick, I think, is finding a way to negotiate the competing demands of our personal passions and interests and of the market that determines the material resources that we have to pursue those passions and interests. And that is a really difficult set of competing demands to negotiate. And there's no one-size-fits-all model for doing it.
One of the difficulties of working on a project involving Super-Duper-Ultra-Non-Canonical texts is attempting to explain why we should know something about them specifically. For example, a helpful older article about the font of W. M. Thackeray's History of Henry Esmond, James C. Simmons' "Thackeray's Esmond and Anne Manning's 'Spurious Antiques,'" uses Manning and the reception of her work to explain why Thackeray might have wanted to use an older typeface for his first edition [1]. But while this method indicates that Manning (along with Hannah Rathbone) first collaborated with her publisher to utilize antiquarian typefaces for historical fiction, it eventually displaces her in favor of Thackeray. That is, Manning's fiction turns into Esmond's historical context; it does not exist as an object of interest or investigation in its own right. Three decades later, Simmons' article would still be more publishable in many scholarly niches than, say, a single-author article on E. C. Agnew, who wrote one of the most famous Catholic novels of the nineteenth century.
This problem multiplies once you enter book territory. Like Dr. Crazy, I have canonical authors in my dissertation & Book One (in fact, Book One has an additional canonical author) because they made it easier to market both my work and myself to hiring committees, editors, and readers--even though the project's real focus was on the non-canonical work. Book Two is much more, ah, exciting in this respect, because while the Victorians as a whole were passionately obsessed with the Reformation, and fictionalized it endlessly (sigh...), canonical Victorian novelists quietly avoided it altogether. Sir Walter Scott wrote a couple of novels set during the Scottish Reformation (yay!), but he isn't a Victorian novelist (boo!). George Eliot wrote a novel featuring Savonarola (yay?), who, by Victorian standards, qualifies as at least proto-Protestant (yay!), but as of yet, Romola doesn't interface well with any chapters I've planned (boo!). Perhaps Scott will go in the introduction and Eliot in the conclusion...
[1] James C. Simmons, "Thackeray's Esmond and Anne Manning's 'Spurious Antiques,'" Victorian Newsletter 42 (1973): 22-24.