Primary Sources, Archival Research, and Resources: Creatures, Vaults, and Charnel Houses

As a researcher, in all likelihood you won’t be able to, nor, frankly, should you want to, limit yourselves to secondary sources. Instead, primary sources should also be a consideration in your research (see the section “Discovery and Exploration: Finding and Using Different Sources”above for a definition of primary vs. secondary sources). These include, above all else, the texts themselves that you are reading and analyzing.

There are a number of good reasons for going to direct, primary resources for your research, including, but not limited to the following: immediate interaction with a particular text; a deeper understanding of the factors and contexts that influenced a text’s creation, that can be gained from engagement with sources such as authorial correspondence, textual variations (i.e. manuscripts), or organizational records; and the opportunity for you to conduct true original research, creating your own interpretations and analyses of a given text without being overly influenced or stifled by the words and thoughts of scholars and students who came before you. Primary source research is a chance to really make the text and its interpretation your own.

This will be of particular importance when you decide to conduct research on texts or topics with little or no secondary scholarly literature (for example, for more obscure texts or for products of newer media such as streaming television series, MMORPGs, or recent media franchises). In these cases, you’re going to be a research pioneer; while this can be heady and exciting, it will also mean that you will have fewer resources on which to draw. It can be challenging!

So in looking at the research process, let’s start with an example that will be familiar to you already: Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. And let’s start with a repository of primary research sources that is close to home: Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, at Texas A&M University. A special collections library or archives can be an immensely valuable and fruitful source of information for researchers, not least because they often hold materials for which there are no available online versions, but also because they provide opportunities to directly engage with the physicality and artifactual nature of texts as objects. (In less fancy terms, there’s a great deal of emotional resonance and joy in actually getting to physically interact with and handle materials from the past.)

Frankenstein, then. Certainly the text of the novel itself, and countless examples of related scholarship, are accessible online. However, there is value in looking at different versions and adaptations of the novel, many of which, due to copyright or other reasons, have to be seen in the flesh, as it were. Think of the many iterations of the Frankenstein story as the pieces of dead tissue that we use, as the obsessed Victor, to stitch together into a new, lively, scholarly whole.

Cushing Library holds a number of primary Frankenstein or Frankenstein-related texts, including:

• The 1823 second edition, crediting Mary Shelley as the author for the first time in English
• The 1826 play The Fate of Frankenstein, by Henry M. Milner, a primary inspiration for future Frankenstein films
• The crucially important 1831 third edition of the novel (the first edition with illustrations), which added a great deal of text, including Shelley’s introduction in which she explained the tale’s origin story for the first time
• The 1833 first American edition of the novel
• The 1931 “Photoplay” edition of the novel, containing stills from the Boris Karloff film
• The 1934 Lynd Ward-illustrated edition of the novel
• The 1994 notably grotesque Bernie Wrightson-illustrated edition of the novel
• The 2013 particularly striking Gris Grimly-illustrated edition of the novel
• The 2017 annotated scholarly version of the novel
• The 2017 critical edition of the novel annotated for and by scientists and engineers
• A 2018 facsimile of Shelley’s original manuscript of the novel (held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University)

Many of these items have no online equivalent but require you, the researcher, to actually visit the library and interact with them here at Cushing Library.^[1] If all that you require for your research is the simple, straightforward text of the novel, then there are numerous online versions, since the book is in the public domain. (Of course, these are likely to be free of any scholarly or interpretive apparatus, such as annotations or footnotes, keep in mind.) But repositories of primary materials, like Cushing Library, provide access to a wide range of potentially useful materials beyond what is available electronically.

Finding New Monsters: Scholarship in Unexpected Areas

But of course, Frankenstein has been done to death, so to speak. Many topics you might wish to explore and many of the texts you’re likely to encounter have also been covered in many ways by generations of scholars. That shouldn’t at all deter you from pursuing a project involving any of these oft-studied texts, particularly if you find intrinsic interest and joy in the text. Write on whatever moves you. Along those same lines, you shouldn’t feel intimidated or reluctant to pursue topics that have little or no previous scholarship surrounding them. Not if you love those texts. Not if they mean something to you, and not if you think there could be something interesting to say about them.

Accept the dearth of scholarship as a challenge, and welcome the opportunity to blaze new scholarly trails. Take satisfaction in the knowledge that you could become a research pioneer, among the first to write on a particular topic. Certainly there are vast numbers of novels, stories, poems, and other textual works of fiction that remain understudied or untouched by scholars, and many authors whose manuscripts and other papers are still new to the scholarly community. (You can find the repositories for many of these authors at Science Fiction and Fantasy Archival Collections).^[2] More obscure or unstudied texts can be found in libraries and archival repositories via a number of different media, including, for example:

• Pulp magazines: the vast array of cheaply made publications extremely popular between the 1920s-1960s. Many famous and studied creators got their start in the pulps, but there are many more whose work has never been adequately studied or analyzed.
• Paperbacks: Paperbacks became the major source of original genre literature starting in the 1950s, replacing pulps as the primary delivery system for speculative fiction in the Anglo-American world. As with pulps, many famous authors were part of the paperback revolution, but lesser-studied creators also made their mark (or failed to), including a growing number of female creators
• Ephemera and objects: Texts have lives beyond the written word, in many cases, particularly popular ones. Many interesting literary and cultural insights can be drawn about a text or author through ancillary materials based on the texts themselves, including things like toys, games, costumes, art, and other physical objects, whether “official” merchandise or fan-created.

Newer media, of course, have smaller bodies of research written about them, and so the field of new and original research is naturally wider with these. There is a long tradition of scholarship and research with things like film, television, and animation, of course, but certainly there’s a great deal of fruitful scholarship to be mined even from frequently-studied media productions like Star Trek or Star Wars (not least because those two have vastly expanded their franchises in the last few decades and thus inspired new and ever-growing sources of interesting research material).

But the field is limitless. There is valuable scholarly research to be done on newer kinds of texts and materials related to speculative fiction, such as video games, role-playing and trading card games, works produced by fans such as fanfic, or online streaming creative productions. Again, if these are things that catch your interest as fans or consumers, there’s no reason why they couldn’t or shouldn’t catch your interest as scholars. But bear in mind that you may find yourself in the position of having little or no previous secondary research to rely on. Consider Victor Frankenstein, working in a new research field, one he created from scratch after throwing out Agrippa and Paracelsus as “sad trash”. He faced…challenges, let us say, but in the end, you can’t deny that he created something entirely new and unprecedented.

The Creature Flees the Laboratory: Resources Beyond TAMU

Many physical and electronic resources are at your disposal at TAMU Libraries, whether at Cushing’s special collections or Evans’ wide range of accessible, circulating materials. However, in many cases even the vast array of materials available to you on campus will not be enough for effective or quality research. You shouldn’t go into any research project assuming that everything you need will be available to you through TAMU-centered resources only. Remember, also, that you shouldn’t limit your choice of topic based solely on what you might find at TAMU Libraries—think boldly and think what interests you, not merely what you can fit into the resources you can find on campus.

Obviously, TAMU Libraries have access to virtually limitless electronic resources, including both texts in the public domain and databases of secondary scholarly literature. But you may find yourself looking for primary materials that neither Cushing nor the Libraries at large hold. Be aware that there are a number of collecting repositories (libraries and archives) beyond Cushing that systematically collect primary historical materials relating to science fiction and fantasy, including printed texts, archival collections, ephemera, and so on. Most of these institutions can make materials available to researchers who cannot personally visit them through providing digital scans or photocopies of materials.

Many of these SF&F repositories, including Cushing, are members of a semi-formal alliance called the Science Fiction Collection Libraries Consortium. The Consortium has a continually updated wiki listing many archival collections in their holdings, grouped alphabetically by name of subject/creator. The wiki is available at: Science Fiction and Fantasy Archival Collections.^[3] And this wiki will lead you to the online presences of the major institutions in the United States and elsewhere that collect science fiction and fantasy-related materials , including, to name only a few:

• The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside (the largest SF&F research collection in the world)^[4]
• The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy at the Toronto Public Library (the largest in Canada)^[5]
• The University of Liverpool’s Science Fiction Collections (the largest in Europe)^[6]
• The Science Fiction and Fantasy Collections at Northern Illinois University^[7]
• The Science Fiction Collections at the University of Kansas (particularly strong in early 20th century and Pulp Era SF)^[8]
• The Women Authors collections at the University of Oregon (including the papers of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ)^[9]
• The Ray & Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University^[10]

Although you don’t want to limit yourself to researching secondary literature, there are a number of academic journals devoted to speculative fiction that can provide inspiration and ideas for you in the pursuit of your own projects, including Foundation^[11], Science Fiction Studies^[12], Extrapolation^[13], FEMSPEC^[14], Science Fiction Film and Television^[15], and the Science Fiction Research Association Review.^[16]

Of course it probably goes without saying to the audiences for this OER, but why not mention that so many different examples of SF&F broadcast media, such as films and television series – live and animated, classic and more recent alike – can be found on numerous streaming services as well as online sources like YouTube. One’s phone or tablet can provide access to decades of filmed speculative fiction, which adds greatly to the ease of producing original and pioneering research on newer media. Ask yourself: is there a movie or show that you really love? Then there’s no reason why you can’t delve into that production and produce a piece or a whole body of scholarly research around it.