English 130 Library Tutorial Module 5: When Your Work Isn’t as Well-Studied

What do I mean by less-studied works?

Most of the advice I’ve given so far is about works for which a large or at least reasonable amount of criticism exists. However, some works have received far more attention than others! Contemporary works in particular may not have had time to build up a body of criticism. On the other hand, even older works may have been neglected by the critics.

So what happens when I search for a book like The Fifth Season, an acclaimed fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin published in 2015? MLAIB gave me one result, but it isn’t relevant. Should I abandon my topic?

Broadening your Search

Don’t abandon your topic too quickly! You can always broaden your search a bit, perhaps searching by author instead of title. This time I did get a few results, and one of them is specifically about the Broken Earth Trilogy, to which The Fifth Season belongs. Still, these results suggest that there is not yet a large body of criticism about Jemisin.

You may find that this strategy works well in a few cases:

• Contemporary works
• Works that are parts of series
• Poems
• Short stories

Criticism about poems and short stories often isn’t indexed by title, and multiple stories and poems are often analyzed together, so searching by author name or collection title is often a good strategy for them.

For contemporary works, it’s useful to see what criticism does exist for an author; additionally, searching by author name might help you find interviews, which are often important sources when you are working with contemporary authors.

Research beyond Criticism of the Author/Work

Additionally, you might consider research that doesn’t focus specifically on the author or work that is the subject of your writing, but instead looks at the context in which this work can be read.

Note that this strategy is useful for well-known works as well as obscure ones, but for obscure or contemporary works, it may be the only strategy available.

The key here is context. If we are still thinking about N.K. Jemisin’s work, there are a few relevant contexts we could consider:

• Genre. How does Jemisin’s work fit into a larger fantasy/science fiction context? Do you think you can find books and articles about how science fiction more generally addresses some of the same themes that her work does? How does hers stand out?
• Subject Matter. You can combine this with genre, if you like! Jemisin’s novel deals with climate change. Is there any criticism about literature on climate change? What about criticism of science fiction on this subject specifically?
• Historical Context. Literary works always exist within a specific historical context. For Jemisin, we might think about what it means to be addressing the subject matter she does within the context of the United States in the early twenty-first century; her historical context surely played a role despite her books being set in fantasy worlds. You can think about this in a literary context (what were other authors of the same time and place doing?) or a historical context (what historical events and conditions may have contributed to what we see in this literary work?).
• Author’s Social Context. Is there any criticism on women’s science fiction, or black science fiction, or black women’s science fiction?  The point here is not to collapse different authors with similar cultural backgrounds, but rather to identify whether the writing you are considering belongs to part of a larger tradition or movement. (This can be problematic in application, as authors whose identities are marginalized in some ways are more likely to be identified as such than others. However, there are cases where it’s a very useful type of search to do.)

These kinds of sources can help you establish the context and importance of the work you are studying, although they may not address those works directly.

How to Search for Context

These searches are broader in scope than a search for criticism on a single author. Books can more easily cover that scope than articles, so you are more likely to find a relevant book for this kind of search than an article.

Thus, I’d recommend searching in OneSearch. Using the types of subject terms we’ve identified above (for instance, science fiction and climate change), we can find books that analyze this broader context, giving us concepts we can apply to our analysis.

In a scholarly book, the chapters may focus on more specific works or time periods, which may not be relevant to your work, but the introduction and the conclusion are good places to look for the author’s arguments about these contextual concepts more generally.

If you’d like to see me step through this process, I have made a video demonstrating it with the example discussed in this document.

One more note -- if you search for a genre or similar term, and instead find collections of works that are part of the genre, try adding “History and Criticism” to your search. This works because it’s a phrase used in the Library of Congress Subject Headings, a system used to describe the books in OneSearch.

Exercise

Think about the work or works about which you’re writing. What contexts might be relevant to your analysis?

An important step in getting from here to your paper is thinking about how these contexts might be used in your analysis. What aspects of your analysis might be affected by these contexts? How might the sources you find deepen that analysis?