Yesterday, I uploaded version 1.3 of the Critical Annotated Bibliography of some of the more obscure scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and the novel A Confederacy of Dunces.
I am now scraping pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. Previously, I had included all of the theses that were listed in Dissertation Abstracts (DA). This time, I have added annotations to theses that were cataloged in WorldCat, but which were not in DA. I also added annotations to other works that gave brief or tangential references to Toole. One good item added was Giddings's thesis. That thesis was good enough to cause me to come out with version 2.0 of Evidence of Influences. The essay by Simpson is a critique of Confederacy, but it does little to explicate details of the text. de Caro and Jordan discuss Toole's work in their investigation of the use of folklore by literature. It is neither criticism nor interpretation, but it had enough substance to include it.
One source that I reviewed and did not include was Lupack's Insanity as Redemption. That book does mention Toole and Confederacy, but only in passing, and the little that she said indicates that she did not read Confederacy very carefully.
On reviewing this blog, I see that I failed to announce version 1.2 of this same bibliography. That version added annotations for the theses of Kunze and Perkins. One could argue that Kunze is not obscure because it is freely available on the Internet, but it is not in DA and I have not seen it discussed in the scholarly literature. I liked Kunze, and I did not like Perkins. The annotations explain why.
