Obscure/Recent Topics - Find Scholarship and Criticism

Search Full-Text and/or Fast-Updating Databases

When you're searching for something obscure, you will get very few hits, which makes full-text searching more productive:

  • Find a Database (on the guide for graduate students) lists top picks for searching full-text scholarship
  • Google Books has books before they show up in HOLLIS (if we don't have the book yet, use Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan to request a copy)
  • Google Scholar has recent articles and articles released ahead of print. You can filter your results to see only articles published in the last few years.
    • Remember: even if the article focuses on an older example, the author may still mention more recent examples, especially in the introduction.

Expand the Kind of Sources You Use

Especially for more recent topics, the discussions around that topic may not yet have made their way through the very slow publishing timeline for academic books and journals. This means you need to expand your search to other publication venues, where you'll find insightful expert analysis, often written by literary scholars or by the author themselves.

Make sure to vet the source! A good trick for evaluating a platform is to use the Google search operators site: and - together to exclude a website's self-descriptions from your results. For example, if you're trying to figure whether the content posted to Medium.com goes through any kind of editorial review, paste this into a Google search: medium.com -site:medium.com

Author interviews

  • Check author webpage for links and references
  • do a general web search for [author name] interview (you'll likely find audio and video as well as text!)
  • some databases, e.g. Academic Search Premier, allow you to limit your search only to interviews

Long-form journalism and highbrow magazines

Author or publisher site
  • Check for a "press" section on an author's webpage, or, on the publisher's site, find the page for the book you're interested in and hunt for any references or quotes from reviews
  • Note: the articles you find this way will skew positive
Library databases
Individual magazine websites

Use the magazines' own search function to identify articles and then get access through the library with the Check Harvard Library Bookmark, HOLLIS (search the magazine name), and/or Interlibrary Loan

Lists of top magazines

Odile's picks

Social media

Many academics and literary writers maintain blogs or social media profiles where they share thoughts on recent reading and have conversations with each other. It takes a little work to find the conversation as the landscape becomes less centralized and more monetized. (What was once an active Twitter community is now scattered across a few different platforms, and bloggers have begun moving to paid newsletters on platforms like Medium and Substack.) Try looking up a few individuals by name, and then follow links and references to build up your personalized feed.

Expand the Scope of Your Topic

Good research involves constantly revisiting and revising your topic. Even if it's true that nothing has been written on the main topic you're working on, it's always a good idea to keep reframing your search topic until you find something you can connect to---another scholar to think with.

Think about how you would describe an obscure author or text in terms of:

  • literary movement
  • associates (what other names co-occur with your topic?)
  • time period
  • region
  • genre

Expand what You Use Sources For

  • Browse journals and monograph series on the general topic
  • Read for methodology and rhetoric as well as content