Tolkien Exceptionalism in the Published Scholarship

Recently started reading Amber Lehning's The Map of Wilderland: Ecocritical Reflections on Tolkien's Myth of Wilderness (2022), and while I'm not far along enough in the book to offer a final opinion, I did get stopped in my tracks by one early remark in particular: 

Had he written nothing else, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" would have been enough to rank Tolkien among the great critical thinkers of Western literature. (8)

It's hard to believe that no one, nowhere, in the entire production process, caught this truly wince-worthy hagiographic exaggeration. Of course, Tolkien's essay undoubtedly is the single most famous essay ever composed on Beowulf, but still ..... "great critical thinkers"? 

Tolkien was a brilliant philologist, to be sure, but even among medievalists there's a lot of competition for the spot of top dog. When you branch that out to great "critical" thinkers of all Western literature, that makes me question if how many of those other thinkers you've actually read. (Lehning doesn't seem to be using the term "critical" in terms of critique, just in terms of literary critic, which is a lower bar, but the point remains.) This sort of hagiographic statement, though, isn't untypical of some brands of Tolkienism, and it doesn't bode well for the remainder of her book.

Going through Lehning's bibliography, furthermore, I barely see any citations of actual medievalists or mainstream literary critics. She seems entirely laser-focused on Tolkien scholarship and a few ecocritical works, and this sort of parochialism within the field continually frustrates me. It seems quite common, too, in books published Kent State UP. The press specializes in Inklings-related scholarship, and while many of their publications are perfectly competent, few go beyond the narrow field of Tolkien Studies into literary studies writ large. 

This parochialism doesn't always have to be detrimental to the book. For instance, Don W. King's recent biography of Warren Lewis was excellent, and his sources adequately serve the purpose of a biography for a minor figure. Otherwise, the limitations are limiting. At most, the Kent State UP books I have in mind branch off into some sub-specialty of the author's choosing. In Lehning's case that's ecocriticism, and in the case of John Rosegrant's Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss (2022), which I enjoyed, that sub-specialty is psychoanalysis.

Yet neither tries engaging with the ideas or methodologies of literary studies as a wider field. They don't even much engage with the work of other non-Tolkien fantasy scholars -- Attebery, Mendelsohn, Gifford, Michael T. Saler, etc. These books thus remain very author-centric, and not only does that limited the range of scholars who'd like to read these volumes (i.e. Tolkien books are only for Tolkienists), but it limits the sorts of critical questions these authors even think to ask. 

----------

P.s. As a read a little more of the volume, one more example of drastic over-reach in Lehning. In her book, as Lehning tries to motivate the world-changing impact of yet one more ecocritical reading of Tolkien, she bizarrely pooh-poohs The Lorax and Avatar – one of the highest grossest films of all time – in favor of a “genuinely popular” story like LotR (p. 200).