Ready to shake up your tired old examples in your college essays? Want a fresh literary reference or two to wow a professor and distinguish your work from the rest of the pile? You’ve come to the right place.
Incorporating hidden literary gems into your college papers can add depth and originality, making it easier to impress your professors or even ask a service to write my essay when you’re pressed for time. Academized.com offers expert writing assistance, helping students write unique and well-researched essays to elevate their academic work.
Here’s a guide to a few hidden literary treasures that can kick-start your academic writing and take things up a literary notch. If you can work a few of these lesser-known works into your essays and research papers, you’ll demonstrate a breadth of knowledge beyond your peers and contribute some new perspectives to your arguments.
The Power of Obscure References
Have you ever tried to write a college paper? If so, then you know what it’s like to reach deeply into the recesses of your brain and come out with such a well-tread classic as William Shakespeare’s plays or F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). These are great works, but just about every professor has had to read dozens of papers that quote them, making her familiar with the major themes and tropes. Writing about a lesser-known work of literature can freshen up a paper.
If you can cite obscure treasures in your own writing, that tends to indicate that you have read beyond the syllabus. You’re more likely to make a good impression with your professors, and you might even receive a slightly better grade, if your teacher feels you deserve it. More importantly, reading off the beaten path can enrich your own reading life and expand your sense of what literature has to offer in terms of styles, cultures and historical periods.
Expanding Your Literary Toolkit
Using hidden literary gems in your college papers can greatly enhance their quality and originality, with college paper writing services available to help polish your work and ensure it stands out academically. Before we get to specific recommendations, a note on how to properly use these obscure works in your papers: the most important thing when quoting obscure works is not to do so for the sake of it, but to add them thoughtfully and purposefully. To introduce a less familiar work in your paper, provide some context first to help your reader situate it. Explain its importance to your argument or theme, and how it connects meaningfully to your main topic.
Keep in mind that all this is meant to enhance your writing, not to show off. Works must genuinely contribute to your analysis or support your thesis. Making your case through the voices of others, however, can bring power and profundity to your academic work. So, to get you started, here are a few literary gemstones you can drop in your papers to polish and enliven them for college.
Forgotten Classics from Around the World
Some of my students limit themselves to work only from their country or language. This is a mistake, because reading works from outside your own nationality or language can teach you a lot that you would not have noticed otherwise.
Think of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, one of the world’s first novels, a 12th-century Japanese masterpiece that depicts court life with an unparalleled precision, and is open to analysis from the perspectives of literature, sociology, anthropology and many other disciplines.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez is another diamond in the rough: most people in Latin America have read it, but few students in the US have, despite the fact that its multigenerational saga of magic realism offers something completely different to the way many US students approach papers on everything from family relations to the effects of colonialism.
Go for ‘The Master and Margarita’ (1966) by Mikhail Bulgakov – the literal title of the book, satirizing Soviet Russia and set in modern-day Moscow, intertwines a visit from the devil with a re-telling of the passion of Christ as the story of Pontius Pilate. The complexity of its narratives and its commentary on art, politics and religion make it an ideal starting point for academic writing.
Underappreciated Female Authors
There is still a treasure trove of written work by female authors that is well overdue for discovery, and that includes texts in your field that have historically been left out of literary canons. Your paper will benefit if you include more voices that form part of a counter-canon. They will introduce different lenses that will offer a new perspective on the story and show alternative ways of narrating them.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) remains a powerful depiction of African American life during the early 20th century, even as it gradually achieves widespread recognition so many years after its initial publication. Few college papers adequately invoke its concerns with identity, love, and potential in service of broader themes such as gender, race, or the American literary tradition.
Across the Atlantic, Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) tosses gender around playfully, stretching it over centuries and defying gravity and gender norms. Depending on what angle an instructor might be approaching the course, a paper informed by Orlando could add an intriguing dimension to gender studies or queer theory, or be a useful tool to talk about the evolution of the novel form.
For a more recent example, select The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy, a richly detailed family story about forbidden love, social barriers and political unrest in India, whose non-chronological narrative structure and lyrical prose will be appreciated by readers of postcolonial texts or lovers of narrative techniques.
Comparative Analysis Table
To help you choose the right hidden gem for your paper, here’s a comparative analysis of some of the works mentioned:
| Title | Author | Time Period | Key Themes | Potential Paper Topics |
| The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | 11th century | Court life, love, social hierarchy | Gender roles in classical literature, early novel forms |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 20th century | Family, magic realism, colonialism | Latin American history, narrative techniques in modern literature |
| The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 20th century | Satire, religion, art and politics | Soviet literature, the role of the artist in society |
| Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 20th century | Identity, love, African American experience | Race and gender in American literature, dialect in writing |
| Orlando | Virginia Woolf | 20th century | Gender, identity, time | Queer theory, experimental narrative styles |
| The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | 20th century | Family, forbidden love, social norms | Postcolonial literature, non-linear storytelling |
Exploring Different Genres
Instead of being limited to novels, consider other forms such as poetry – especially to add examples to your papers. Poetry can often provide powerful, short examples of the engagements you are trying to develop.
Consider the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, with her deceptively unadorned style and her big questions wittily answered: Her poems, many of them diminutive and disarmingly accessible, work well as citation fodder for papers on existentialism, the met, or whatever else.
For the drama enthusiast, go straight past Shakespeare to playwrights such as August Wilson, whose ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’, a series of 10 plays that dramatized the African American experience of the 20th century, will generate hours of meaningful debate over race, family and the American Dream.
Short stories can be just as useful in your papers and Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer known for complex, mind-bending tales, is a good late addition to your canon of inspiration. Borges stories tend to focus on infinity, reality and the nature of knowledge, and they might add an intellectual luster to a paper on philosophy or literature.
Bridging Disciplines with Interdisciplinary Works
Among the most interesting Swiss-army-knife resources are those that span disciplines. You might find these especially handy for papers that call for a multidisciplinary presentation or that provide added support for the broader importance, context or implications of your research topic.
Consider Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), which trawls the space between mathematics and art and music – surely many students will not know that a copy sits in their library, ready to help along a paper on artificial intelligence or cognitive science.
If you’re looking for the perfect blend of science and literature, pick up Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (1975), a poignant memoir in which the elements are used as a springboard for reflections about life, work and the Holocaust. The book is a treasure trove of ideas for papers that explore the interplay between science and the human condition.
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, an autobiographical graphic novel about growing up during the Iranian Revolution, can supplement papers on a range of topics, including coming-of-age stories, political history, or visual narratives.
Unearthing Literary Treasures
So now you’ve heard about a few of my secret finds, but how do you find more of your own? Here are some tips for secret-seeking in books, movies and culture.
Look at literary prizes other than the ones you’ve heard of. For instance, the Man Booker International Prize is given to a body of work rather than a single novel; it looks at literature translated into English from around the world. The Neustadt International Prize for Literature is one of the best ways of discovering international authors.
Don’t neglect the classics. There are some great books from centuries past that are worth reading or revisiting – it’s a wellspring of ideas that many students haven’t explored. Consider exploring Project Gutenberg or other digital archives for books out of copyright.
Read in translation. Most literature taught on English-language curriculums is written in English, which means a lot of great international works get left out in the cold. Seek out translated works from languages and cultures you don’t know well.
Ask your professors and librarians to suggest some less well-known works. They might know of some obscure books that will be useful for a paper you’re writing or that relate to your area of interest.
Conclusion: Elevating Your Academic Writing
Going a little off the beaten path to include some passages from lesser-known works can enliven and enrich your college essays and papers. Because of the rarity of their use, these brief and beautiful passages can lend new perspectives to your writing and show that you have a decent literary education.
That’s why it’s so important to use these words carefully and appropriately. Don’t sprinkle in recherché references just to show off. They should advance your argument or analysis, enhance your discussion, or make your point. Introduce less familiar words with context. Draw a clear line between them and your main topic.
Your college papers will get better, and you will become a richer literary citizen of the world. Next time you go to write something for class, seek out an unsung title or two and see how they work their way in. Happy writing!
