how to use literary criticism in an essay

The Hyperbolit School

Your trusty englit guide.

How to use literary criticism in your own essays

I recently asked my YouTube subscribers about the topics they’d like to see from the channel, and the one that came out top was ‘how to use literary criticism in your own essays’. 

Being able to incorporate literary criticism in literature essays is a skill that any top grade lit students should master.

In this post, then, I’ll explain what literary criticism is, why we should care, and suggest 3 steps to using lit crit in an essay. I’ll also demonstrate how I’d use two sets of critical views in an essay on Macbeth .

Primary text vs secondary text – what’s the difference?

Let’s start by clarifying the difference between ‘primary texts’ and ‘secondary texts’. 

In literature, ‘primary texts’ refer to the original creative works, like novels, short stories, poems, plays, personal essays etc.

In most cases, they should be the focus of a lit course, which is why we tend to regard dramatists like William Shakespeare, novelists like Jane Austen, poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley, or even essayists like Joan Didion as primary text authors. 

When it comes to ‘secondary texts’, as the name itself would suggest, these are the critical responses to original creative works, otherwise known as ‘literary criticism’. 

Often, we refer to people who write ‘literary criticism’ as ‘literary critics’, but that’s not to say they are always ‘critical’ about literature in a negative, detractive way. Remember, criticism in literature simply means a professional evaluation and appreciation of written works.  English professors are by default also literary critics, and in fact, you – as an English lit student – are also a literary critic everytime you write an essay analysing a literary text. Professional literary critics are often categorised according to different literary theories or approaches, such as femininst, postcolonial, historicist, structuralist, psychoanalytical, Marxist etc.

Okay… but why bother with lit crit at all?

Literary criticism can be a divisive topic in literary studies – it’s kind of like marmite: you either love it and see criticism as its own field of literary genre, or you hate it and can’t see the point of reading dense, academic prose that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. 

But love it or hate it, being able to incorporate critical views in your own analysis can help you gain higher marks, as it shows sophisticated engagement with texts, and if you’re planning on studying literature at a higher level, literary criticism will be a regular presence on your course. 

In general, literary criticism carries great value in that it preserves the intellectual tradition of a culture, and it also helps us appreciate how language transcends time and space to communicate universal ideas about human nature and existence. 

To use a travel analogy, creative works are like beautiful exotic cities steeped in history, culture and their own unique customs, while critical works are like the tour guides, who curate for us the local highlights, uncover the hidden alleyways, and decipher the mystique of the sites and attractions for a more enlightened experience. 

Technically, this is what a lit crit should do, and indeed, what good lit crits do do. But of course, there are such literary critics who confuse more than clarify with obfuscating and convoluted prose. 

How to use literary criticism in your own essay – 3 steps

Step 1: find different views and evaluate where you stand between them.

They say that the first rule of fight club is that you don’t talk about fight club. Well, I say the first rule of using literary criticism is that you don’t focus on the literary criticism. Because at the end of the day, it’s your analysis and your essay, so your view on the novel, play, or poem is the point – not the critic’s. 

Once upon a time when I first came to know about lit crit, I was so enchanted with the seeming sophistication of it all I would turn my essays into an echo chamber of everyone else’s opinions on a text, in the process completely neglecting to express my own thoughts. 

Instead, I’ve learnt through the hard way that the right thing to do is to read a good amount of quality secondary criticism around a topic or text, then identify opposing critical viewpoints, and finally, evaluate where you stand between them. 

Step 2: Understanding the critics’ angle and approach

This brings us to the next step – how do we go about finding ‘opposing’ views in the wild west of literary criticism? 

The way to do this is to understand the critic’s angle and approach – which usually stems from their theoretical or ideological agenda. 

Is the critic a historicist (someone who reads literature as a product of historical developments)? A feminist (someone who reads literature for gender tensions and power dynamics)? A structuralist (someone who reads literature as a compendium of codes, signs and structures)? A psychoanalyst (someone who reads literature through the lens of psychoanalysis and psychiatric ideas)? Or a Marxist (someone who reads literature for systems of class struggle between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, or the exploiters versus the proletariats. 

Even for critics who don’t come from a specific theoretical discipline, they still have an agenda – for instance, if a critic focuses only on what’s presented in the text – the language, form, devices – ignoring whatever contextual influences that may have gone into the writing of the text, then that makes them a textualist or formalist . In literary scholarship, this is referred to as Practical Criticism, otherwise known as close reading, which is the approach that most schools tend to teach. 

Once you figure out where a certain critic is coming from, you should be able to discern what other types of critics are likely to disagree with this critic, and most importantly, decide whether or not you agree with their respective views vis-a-vis the text you’re analysing. 

For a deeper understanding of critical approaches and theoretical angles, I recommend Mary Klages’ Key Terms in Literary Theory , which is a comprehensive glossary of advanced literary concepts. 

Step 3: Challenge over concur; interpret over parrot

It may sound counterintuitive, but often, the best way of using lit crit is to disagree with it. Because most of the time, it’s only by challenging someone’s view do we really get to consider our own stance. Agreeing with a critic’s view is much less interesting – and there’s only so much we can say if we agree. 

Of course, that’s not to say we must always seek to be contrarian, but a good approach is to conduct an imaginary discussion with multiple critics who hold different viewpoints, and to consider that if we disagree with a critic’s view, why that is and make our case, and if we do happen to agree with another critic’s view, what else we can add to it based on our own interpretation of the text. 

In general, if all we do is say ‘this is what I think and prominent critic so-and-so also says this’, we run the risk of coming across insipid and uninspired in our arguments, or worse, that we’re just parroting the critic’s ideas and repurposing it as our own. 

Example – Stephen Greenblatt and Emma Smith on Macbeth

Now, I’m going to demonstrate how we can write a paragraph incorporating opposing critical viewpoints. 

For my primary text, I’ll be using Macbeth; and for my secondary texts, I’ll be citing from Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘ Shakespeare Bewitched ’ and Emma Smith’s This is Shakespeare , largely because they present rather different views on the presentation of witchcraft in the play.

In addressing an essay topic like ‘How are the witches presented in Macbeth ’, I’ll first consider what I think about this prompt. 

Well, I see the witches as playing various roles: on the one hand, they function as a theatrical device for the effect of sensationalist spectacle, which would have appealed to superstitious playgoers back in Shakespeare’s time. 

But on a deeper level, the witches are a magnifier of human flaws – it isn’t so much their curses and temptations that are the point, as it is how Macbeth reacts to these ‘supernatural solicitings’ that’s central to the message of the play. 

So you’ll notice that I’m adopting a hybrid approach that looks at Macbeth from both performative and humanistic angles. 

But for someone like Stephen Greenblatt, who I believe is one of the best Shakespearean critics alive, he sees the witches as playing a more metaphysical function, and argues that Shakespeare uses these Weird Sisters to interrogate the limits of theatre: by presenting on stage in concrete form what’s supposedly taboo, supernatural and therefore, unreal, the bard confuses the line between truth and imagination, and in a way, doesn’t so much suggest witchcraft and potions as a great source of danger, as it is perhaps that drama and language are a great source of power, having the capacity to make ‘real’ what’s not – like magic. 

As Greenblatt writes:

… Shakespeare is staging the epistemological and ontological dilemmas that in the deeply contradictory ideological situation of his time haunted virtually all attempts to determine the status of witchcraft beliefs and practices. And he is at the same time and by the same means staging the insistent, unresolved questions that haunt the practice of the theatre. For Macbeth manifests a deep, intuitive recognition that the theatre and witchcraft are both constructed on the boundary between fantasy and reality, the border or membrane where the imagination and the corporeal world, figure and actuality, psychic disturbance and objective truth meet. The means normally used to secure that border are speech and sight, but it is exactly these that are uncertain; the witches, as Macbeth exclaims, are “imperfect speakers,” and at the moment he insists that they account for themselves, they vanish. (‘ Shakespeare Bewitched ’) 

Let’s now bring in an alternative critical view, this time, by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford, who often takes a broad, diverse approach to reading Shakespeare, but on the whole leans towards the historicist camp. 

Unlike Greenblatt, she posits that the witches don’t actually serve such a serious role in the play, and are less “active agents than passive predictors of how things will turn out”. 

She also argues that Shakespeare, in writing Macbeth , was to a large extent stroking King James’ ego buttons and establishing himself as a staunch Jacobean loyalist, being “a mouthpiece for Jacobean hereditary monarchy, for his new king James, and for the Stuart dynasty safely cushioned by two young princes” ( Ch. 16, This is Shakespeare ). 

However, this strong royal consciousness underlying Macbeth isn’t something Greenblatt agrees with, as he writes in his analysis that “no one in the [Jacobean] period, least of all [Shakespeare’s] players themselves, understood the designation ‘King’s Men’ to imply an official, prescriptive function, […] Neither Shakespeare nor his company were speaking dogmatically or even indirectly on behalf of any institution except the marginal, somewhat disreputable institution of the theatre, disreputable precisely because it was the acknowledged house of fantasies”. 

So – if I were to write up a paragraph triangulating Greenblatt, Smith and my own views, then it could look something like this:

In This is Shakespeare, Emma Smith argues that Shakespeare wrote the play with a strong political consciousness in mind, and in writing Macbeth , was to a large extent stroking King James’ ego buttons and establishing himself as a staunch Jacobean loyalist, being “a “a mouthpiece for Jacobean hereditary monarchy, for his new king James, and for the Stuart dynasty safely cushioned by two young princes”. As such, the witches are not meant to play a key role in the play, least of all be associated with the human realm, as they are less “active agents than passive predictors of how things will turn out”.  Yet this strong royal consciousness underlying Macbeth isn’t something Greenblatt agrees with, as he writes in his analysis that “no one in the [Jacobean] period, least of all [Shakespeare’s] players themselves, understood the designation ‘King’s Men’ to imply an official, prescriptive function, […] Neither Shakespeare nor his company were speaking dogmatically or even indirectly on behalf of any institution except the marginal, somewhat disreputable institution of the theatre, disreputable precisely because it was the acknowledged house of fantasies”. Rather, his view of the witches is that they carry metaphysical currency, being these theatrical devices which help Shakespeare interrogate the limits of theatre. By presenting on stage in concrete form what’s supposedly taboo, supernatural and therefore, imaginary, the bard confuses the line between the real and the imaginary, and in a way, doesn’t so much suggest witchcraft and potions as a great source of danger, as it is perhaps that drama and language as a great source of power, having the capacity to make ‘real’ what’s not – like magic.  Notwithstanding the political and epistemological concerns that may have been at the back of Shakespeare’s mind, it is perhaps undeniable that the witches hold a central function in the play as a theatrical device for the effect of sensationalist – if not entertaining – spectacle, which would have appealed to superstitious playgoers back in Shakespeare’s time and contributed to the company’s professional success. On a deeper level, the witches serve as a magnifier of human flaws, with prophecy and temptation eliciting a definitive response from Macbeth that exposes the depths of his troubled psychology. So, while the witches aren’t as ancillary a character as Smith suggests, nor as solemn a motif as Greenblatt posits, they occupy a singular, important position in the play as a concave mirror for the tragic hero’s flaws, on which every reaction Macbeth gives to their “supernatural soliciting” eventually compose a map of his own demise. 

Want more study tips on English Lit? Check out my other blog posts below:

• How to write about context in literary analysis essays
• How to analyse any unseen poem – 3 tips
• How to analyse prose with Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies

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One thought on “ How to use literary criticism in your own essays ”

Nice follow up to the previous blog I just read. I really don’t know much about lit crit either! Shush! can you believe I only studied English up to GCSE 😆😅

It so interesting to find out what academics make of things. so many thoughts and ideas. often way more than original thing.

Do you write creatively too?

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Introduction

You’ve been assigned a literary analysis paper—what does that even mean? Is it like a book report that you used to write in high school? Well, not really.

A literary analysis essay asks you to make an original argument about a poem, play, or work of fiction and support that argument with research and evidence from your careful reading of the text.

It can take many forms, such as a close reading of a text, critiquing the text through a particular literary theory, comparing one text to another, or criticizing another critic’s interpretation of the text. While there are many ways to structure a literary essay, writing this kind of essay follows generally follows a similar process for everyone

Crafting a good literary analysis essay begins with good close reading of the text, in which you have kept notes and observations as you read. This will help you with the first step, which is selecting a topic to write about—what jumped out as you read, what are you genuinely interested in? The next step is to focus your topic, developing it into an argument—why is this subject or observation important? Why should your reader care about it as much as you do? The third step is to gather evidence to support your argument, for literary analysis, support comes in the form of evidence from the text and from your research on what other literary critics have said about your topic. Only after you have performed these steps, are you ready to begin actually writing your essay.

Writing a Literary Analysis Essay

How to create a topic and conduct research:.

Writing an Analysis of a Poem, Story, or Play

If you are taking a literature course, it is important that you know how to write an analysis—sometimes called an interpretation or a literary analysis or a critical reading or a critical analysis—of a story, a poem, and a play. Your instructor will probably assign such an analysis as part of the course assessment. On your mid-term or final exam, you might have to write an analysis of one or more of the poems and/or stories on your reading list. Or the dreaded “sight poem or story” might appear on an exam, a work that is not on the reading list, that you have not read before, but one your instructor includes on the exam to examine your ability to apply the active reading skills you have learned in class to produce, independently, an effective literary analysis.You might be asked to write instead or, or in addition to an analysis of a literary work, a more sophisticated essay in which you compare and contrast the protagonists of two stories, or the use of form and metaphor in two poems, or the tragic heroes in two plays.

You might learn some literary theory in your course and be asked to apply theory—feminist, Marxist, reader-response, psychoanalytic, new historicist, for example—to one or more of the works on your reading list. But the seminal assignment in a literature course is the analysis of the single poem, story, novel, or play, and, even if you do not have to complete this assignment specifically, it will form the basis of most of the other writing assignments you will be required to undertake in your literature class. There are several ways of structuring a literary analysis, and your instructor might issue specific instructions on how he or she wants this assignment done. The method presented here might not be identical to the one your instructor wants you to follow, but it will be easy enough to modify, if your instructor expects something a bit different, and it is a good default method, if your instructor does not issue more specific guidelines.You want to begin your analysis with a paragraph that provides the context of the work you are analyzing and a brief account of what you believe to be the poem or story or play’s main theme. At a minimum, your account of the work’s context will include the name of the author, the title of the work, its genre, and the date and place of publication. If there is an important biographical or historical context to the work, you should include that, as well.Try to express the work’s theme in one or two sentences. Theme, you will recall, is that insight into human experience the author offers to readers, usually revealed as the content, the drama, the plot of the poem, story, or play unfolds and the characters interact. Assessing theme can be a complex task. Authors usually show the theme; they don’t tell it. They rarely say, at the end of the story, words to this effect: “and the moral of my story is…” They tell their story, develop their characters, provide some kind of conflict—and from all of this theme emerges. Because identifying theme can be challenging and subjective, it is often a good idea to work through the rest of the analysis, then return to the beginning and assess theme in light of your analysis of the work’s other literary elements.Here is a good example of an introductory paragraph from Ben’s analysis of William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Among School Children.”

“Among School Children” was published in Yeats’ 1928 collection of poems The Tower. It was inspired by a visit Yeats made in 1926 to school in Waterford, an official visit in his capacity as a senator of the Irish Free State. In the course of the tour, Yeats reflects upon his own youth and the experiences that shaped the “sixty-year old, smiling public man” (line 8) he has become. Through his reflection, the theme of the poem emerges: a life has meaning when connections among apparently disparate experiences are forged into a unified whole.

In the body of your literature analysis, you want to guide your readers through a tour of the poem, story, or play, pausing along the way to comment on, analyze, interpret, and explain key incidents, descriptions, dialogue, symbols, the writer’s use of figurative language—any of the elements of literature that are relevant to a sound analysis of this particular work. Your main goal is to explain how the elements of literature work to elucidate, augment, and develop the theme. The elements of literature are common across genres: a story, a narrative poem, and a play all have a plot and characters. But certain genres privilege certain literary elements. In a poem, for example, form, imagery and metaphor might be especially important; in a story, setting and point-of-view might be more important than they are in a poem; in a play, dialogue, stage directions, lighting serve functions rarely relevant in the analysis of a story or poem.

The length of the body of an analysis of a literary work will usually depend upon the length of work being analyzed—the longer the work, the longer the analysis—though your instructor will likely establish a word limit for this assignment. Make certain that you do not simply paraphrase the plot of the story or play or the content of the poem. This is a common weakness in student literary analyses, especially when the analysis is of a poem or a play.

Here is a good example of two body paragraphs from Amelia’s analysis of “Araby” by James Joyce.

Within the story’s first few paragraphs occur several religious references which will accumulate as the story progresses. The narrator is a student at the Christian Brothers’ School; the former tenant of his house was a priest; he left behind books called The Abbot and The Devout Communicant. Near the end of the story’s second paragraph the narrator describes a “central apple tree” in the garden, under which is “the late tenant’s rusty bicycle pump.” We may begin to suspect the tree symbolizes the apple tree in the Garden of Eden and the bicycle pump, the snake which corrupted Eve, a stretch, perhaps, until Joyce’s fall-of-innocence theme becomes more apparent.

The narrator must continue to help his aunt with her errands, but, even when he is so occupied, his mind is on Mangan’s sister, as he tries to sort out his feelings for her. Here Joyce provides vivid insight into the mind of an adolescent boy at once elated and bewildered by his first crush. He wants to tell her of his “confused adoration,” but he does not know if he will ever have the chance. Joyce’s description of the pleasant tension consuming the narrator is conveyed in a striking simile, which continues to develop the narrator’s character, while echoing the religious imagery, so important to the story’s theme: “But my body was like a harp, and her words and gestures were like fingers, running along the wires.”

The concluding paragraph of your analysis should realize two goals. First, it should present your own opinion on the quality of the poem or story or play about which you have been writing. And, second, it should comment on the current relevance of the work. You should certainly comment on the enduring social relevance of the work you are explicating. You may comment, though you should never be obliged to do so, on the personal relevance of the work. Here is the concluding paragraph from Dao-Ming’s analysis of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

First performed in 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest has been made into a film, as recently as 2002 and is regularly revived by professional and amateur theatre companies. It endures not only because of the comic brilliance of its characters and their dialogue, but also because its satire still resonates with contemporary audiences. I am still amazed that I see in my own Asian mother a shadow of Lady Bracknell, with her obsession with finding for her daughter a husband who will maintain, if not, ideally, increase the family’s social status. We might like to think we are more liberated and socially sophisticated than our Victorian ancestors, but the starlets and eligible bachelors who star in current reality television programs illustrate the extent to which superficial concerns still influence decisions about love and even marriage. Even now, we can turn to Oscar Wilde to help us understand and laugh at those who are earnest in name only.

Dao-Ming’s conclusion is brief, but she does manage to praise the play, reaffirm its main theme, and explain its enduring appeal. And note how her last sentence cleverly establishes that sense of closure that is also a feature of an effective analysis.

You may, of course, modify the template that is presented here. Your instructor might favour a somewhat different approach to literary analysis. Its essence, though, will be your understanding and interpretation of the theme of the poem, story, or play and the skill with which the author shapes the elements of literature—plot, character, form, diction, setting, point of view—to support the theme.

Academic Writing Tips : How to Write a Literary Analysis Paper. Authored by: eHow. Located at: https://youtu.be/8adKfLwIrVk. License: All Rights Reserved. License Terms: Standard YouTube license

BC Open Textbooks: English Literature Victorians and Moderns: https://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/back-matter/appendix-5-writing-an-analysis-of-a-poem-story-and-play/

Literary Analysis

The challenges of writing about english literature.

Writing begins with the act of reading . While this statement is true for most college papers, strong English papers tend to be the product of highly attentive reading (and rereading). When your instructors ask you to do a “close reading,” they are asking you to read not only for content, but also for structures and patterns. When you perform a close reading, then, you observe how form and content interact. In some cases, form reinforces content: for example, in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, where the speaker invites God’s “force” “to break, blow, burn and make [him] new.” Here, the stressed monosyllables of the verbs “break,” “blow” and “burn” evoke aurally the force that the speaker invites from God. In other cases, form raises questions about content: for example, a repeated denial of guilt will likely raise questions about the speaker’s professed innocence. When you close read, take an inductive approach. Start by observing particular details in the text, such as a repeated image or word, an unexpected development, or even a contradiction. Often, a detail–such as a repeated image–can help you to identify a question about the text that warrants further examination. So annotate details that strike you as you read. Some of those details will eventually help you to work towards a thesis. And don’t worry if a detail seems trivial. If you can make a case about how an apparently trivial detail reveals something significant about the text, then your paper will have a thought-provoking thesis to argue.

Common Types of English Papers Many assignments will ask you to analyze a single text. Others, however, will ask you to read two or more texts in relation to each other, or to consider a text in light of claims made by other scholars and critics. For most assignments, close reading will be central to your paper. While some assignment guidelines will suggest topics and spell out expectations in detail, others will offer little more than a page limit. Approaching the writing process in the absence of assigned topics can be daunting, but remember that you have resources: in section, you will probably have encountered some examples of close reading; in lecture, you will have encountered some of the course’s central questions and claims. The paper is a chance for you to extend a claim offered in lecture, or to analyze a passage neglected in lecture. In either case, your analysis should do more than recapitulate claims aired in lecture and section. Because different instructors have different goals for an assignment, you should always ask your professor or TF if you have questions. These general guidelines should apply in most cases:

• A close reading of a single text: Depending on the length of the text, you will need to be more or less selective about what you choose to consider. In the case of a sonnet, you will probably have enough room to analyze the text more thoroughly than you would in the case of a novel, for example, though even here you will probably not analyze every single detail. By contrast, in the case of a novel, you might analyze a repeated scene, image, or object (for example, scenes of train travel, images of decay, or objects such as or typewriters). Alternately, you might analyze a perplexing scene (such as a novel’s ending, albeit probably in relation to an earlier moment in the novel). But even when analyzing shorter works, you will need to be selective. Although you might notice numerous interesting details as you read, not all of those details will help you to organize a focused argument about the text. For example, if you are focusing on depictions of sensory experience in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” you probably do not need to analyze the image of a homeless Ruth in stanza 7, unless this image helps you to develop your case about sensory experience in the poem.
• A theoretically-informed close reading. In some courses, you will be asked to analyze a poem, a play, or a novel by using a critical theory (psychoanalytic, postcolonial, gender, etc). For example, you might use Kristeva’s theory of abjection to analyze mother-daughter relations in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Critical theories provide focus for your analysis; if “abjection” is the guiding concept for your paper, you should focus on the scenes in the novel that are most relevant to the concept.
• A historically-informed close reading. In courses with a historicist orientation, you might use less self-consciously literary documents, such as newspapers or devotional manuals, to develop your analysis of a literary work. For example, to analyze how Robinson Crusoe makes sense of his island experiences, you might use Puritan tracts that narrate events in terms of how God organizes them. The tracts could help you to show not only how Robinson Crusoe draws on Puritan narrative conventions, but also—more significantly—how the novel revises those conventions.
• A comparison of two texts When analyzing two texts, you might look for unexpected contrasts between apparently similar texts, or unexpected similarities between apparently dissimilar texts, or for how one text revises or transforms the other. Keep in mind that not all of the similarities, differences, and transformations you identify will be relevant to an argument about the relationship between the two texts. As you work towards a thesis, you will need to decide which of those similarities, differences, or transformations to focus on. Moreover, unless instructed otherwise, you do not need to allot equal space to each text (unless this 50/50 allocation serves your thesis well, of course). Often you will find that one text helps to develop your analysis of another text. For example, you might analyze the transformation of Ariel’s song from The Tempest in T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land. Insofar as this analysis is interested in the afterlife of Ariel’s song in a later poem, you would likely allot more space to analyzing allusions to Ariel’s song in The Waste Land (after initially establishing the song’s significance in Shakespeare’s play, of course).
• A response paper A response paper is a great opportunity to practice your close reading skills without having to develop an entire argument. In most cases, a solid approach is to select a rich passage that rewards analysis (for example, one that depicts an important scene or a recurring image) and close read it. While response papers are a flexible genre, they are not invitations for impressionistic accounts of whether you liked the work or a particular character. Instead, you might use your close reading to raise a question about the text—to open up further investigation, rather than to supply a solution.
• A research paper. In most cases, you will receive guidance from the professor on the scope of the research paper. It is likely that you will be expected to consult sources other than the assigned readings. Hollis is your best bet for book titles, and the MLA bibliography (available through e-resources) for articles. When reading articles, make sure that they have been peer reviewed; you might also ask your TF to recommend reputable journals in the field.

Harvard College Writing Program: https://writingproject.fas.harvard.edu/files/hwp/files/bg_writing_english.pdf

In the same way that we talk with our friends about the latest episode of Game of Thrones or newest Marvel movie, scholars communicate their ideas and interpretations of literature through written literary analysis essays. Literary analysis essays make us better readers of literature.

Only through careful reading and well-argued analysis can we reach new understandings and interpretations of texts that are sometimes hundreds of years old. Literary analysis brings new meaning and can shed new light on texts. Building from careful reading and selecting a topic that you are genuinely interested in, your argument supports how you read and understand a text. Using examples from the text you are discussing in the form of textual evidence further supports your reading. Well-researched literary analysis also includes information about what other scholars have written about a specific text or topic.

Literary analysis helps us to refine our ideas, question what we think we know, and often generates new knowledge about literature. Literary analysis essays allow you to discuss your own interpretation of a given text through careful examination of the choices the original author made in the text.

ENG134 – Literary Genres Copyright © by The American Women's College and Jessica Egan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Literary Criticism for Students (and anyone else)

Getting started, research strategies, online encyclopedias, literary criticism databases, author biography, defining terms and concepts.

• Finding Books & Media
• Finding Articles
• Online Resources
• Literary Theory
• Writing Resources
• Citing Sources
• Print Reference
• Research Services
• Reader Services

What is Literary Criticism?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, literary criticism is "The art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and character of a literary work; consideration or analysis of a text in relation to language, structure, biography, history, etc., or (in later use, freq. with modifying word) by a particular philosophical, political, or linguistic method; (also) an instance of this, esp. in a written form; a school or method of criticizing literature.

• Library research, reading, and note-taking are time consuming.  When planning your time, make sure to take this into account and leave sufficient time for writing, reviewing, and proofreading your paper.
• Request material to come to a branch convenient to you (5-7 days)
• Request material through Interlibrary Loan (3-4 weeks)
• Plan a visit to the Research Library at Copley Square to use in-library-use-only material.
• Use Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) to obtain an overview essay on your author, title, or topic and use that as the starting point for creating a tentative outline and thesis statement for your paper.   Note: When searching GVRL consider not limiting your search to the literature sources.  An unrestricted search returns results from a wide variety of sources some of which could prove useful to your research.   Note: GVRL has a translate feature which should facilitate use of the database for those who do not speak English as a first language. Watch the tutorial .
• Use the literary criticism databases on this page to explore your topic further. This will help to determine whether there is sufficient material to support your thesis or perhaps lead you in a different direction.   Note: Literature Criticism Online can be browsed by topic, which can be useful in suggesting new topics connected to your original search.  Note: Literature Resource Center also has a translate feature.
• Use the bibliographies found in relevant articles to expand your range of sources.
• When taking notes, make sure to put quotation marks around any words that are not your own and take down all the necessary publication information that you will need for your works-cited list, including page numbers and date of access if you are using a website.   Note: You do not need to document material that is common knowledge.
• Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Credo Reference is a giant online reference library that provides access to as many as 162 reference books, including encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, books of quotations, as well as a range of subject-specific titles all cross-referenced throughout the collection. Special features include a crossword solver and conversion calculators.
• Gale eBooks This link opens in a new window Gale Virtual Reference Library includes more than 90 encyclopedias, plus numerous specialized reference sources covering a diversity of subject including Arts, Biography, Business, Education, Environment, History, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation & World, Religion, Science, and Social Science. The Literature collection includes the popular literary criticism sets Drama for Students, Novels for Students, Poetry for Students, Shakespeare for Students, Short Stories for Students, and more. more... less... Includes more than 90 encyclopedias, plus numerous specialized reference sources covering a diversity of subjects including Arts, Biography, Business, Education, Environment, History, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation & World, Religion, Science, and Social Science. Some "Junior" sources included as well.
• Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window Literature Resource Center pulls together materials from many different print and online sources, including scholarly journals, literary reviews, reference books, authoritative websites, and more. The Research Guide walks you through the process of writing a research paper on a literature topic, from choosing a topic to gathering information, from formulating a thesis statement to writing, revising, and preparing a Works Cited page.
• Gale Literature This link opens in a new window An integrated search for Literature Criticism Online, Literature Resource Center, and Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography.
• Gale Literature Criticism This link opens in a new window Literature Criticism Online provides tens of thousands of hard-to-find essays on books and plays by the scholars of today and from the past. This resource includes full-text criticism from ten different sources: Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Shakespeare Criticism, Literature Criticism 1400-1800, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, Drama Criticism, Children's Literature Review
• Gale In Context: Biography This link opens in a new window Nearly 300,000 full-text biographies gathered from Gale's award-winning reference sources and 250 periodicals specifically chosen for their renowned biographical content in a broad range of subject areas.
• A Glossary of Literary Terms A listing of terms with explanations and examples.
• Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new window The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a recognized authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is a guide to the meaning, history and pronunciation of over half a million words.
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• Last Updated: Sep 4, 2024 9:37 AM
• URL: https://guides.bpl.org/literarycriticism