When I was an undergraduate English major we asked our grad. student TA what it was like being a grad. student. One of the things he said grad. students would do is review work that has been left out of the “canon” of whatever time period or genre they worked in to assess its value and see if it should be reintroduced. For his time period, that meant reviewing, apparently, a *LOT* of epic poetry about the American revolution. Like, you know how there’s *The Odyssey*, *The Song of Roland*, *El Cid*, *The Nibelungenlied*, or modern wartime novels like *A Tale of Two Cities*, etc.? Apparently it was quite popular in the 1800s in America to write epic poetry about the American Revolution, with the idea that it would be *the* hallowed tale read about the founding of the United States for centuries to come. It was his job to read these vaunted works detailing the heroic deeds of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and the like.
There was a *LOT* of utter garbage written about the American Revolution in the 1800s.
And so, essentially, there are also a lot of scholarly works (likely unpublished) of grad. students who have gone back in the archives, taken this work very seriously, read it, evaluated it, and come to the conclusion, some hundred pages later, “We haven’t assigned this to students in the past because it was generally accepted that the work sucked. Having evaluated from a modern perspective, it is my opinion that the work does, indeed, suck, and we shouldn’t bother assigning it to students.”
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