Original sentence: Parry and Lord, like the fictitious researchers in the novel, traveled to the Balkans to study changes in the oral transmission of epic poetry and song in order to demonstrate that Homer was not a single individual, but that the Homeric epics that have survived were versions of orally sung poetry that had been transcribed.The File on H has an agenda in cultural history, which for readers less interested in literary theory and history may detract from its success as a novel.The expedition of the two scholars is an obvious allusion to the research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in Bosnia, whose effect was to make the oral epic tradition in Serbo-Croatian far better known, at least in Western scholarship, than it had been before.The novel aims to make the valid point that these Serbo-Croatian complementary traditions were also transmitted in Albanian (a fact that most scholars continued to ignore).The novel also, insistently and with more doubtful validity, emphasizes Albanian cultural primacy
Edited sentence: The File on H has an agenda in cultural history which perhaps detracts from its success as a novel.The expedition of the two scholars is an obvious allusion to the researches of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in Bosnia, whose effect was to make the oral epic tradition in Serbo-Croat far better known, at least in Western scholarship, than it had been before.The novel aims to make the valid point that these and complementary traditions were also transmitted in Albanian (a fact that most scholars continued to ignore); it also, insistently and with more doubtful validity, emphasises Albanian cultural primacy