In order to help minimize spread of the coronavirus and protect our campus community, Cowles Library is adjusting our services, hours, and building access. Read more...
This section of the guide will help with your critical analyses of literary works. Whether by helping you define literary terms and concepts, or by helping you find and explore critical approaches to literature, we hope the resources and tools in this section enhance your critical thinking and research skills.
Rather than rating the quality of an author's work as a whole, literary criticism, or critical analysis, typically focuses on how an author treats a topic or topics. Through interpretation, summarizing, or comparing the work to others, the critic's purpose (in most cases) is to increase the reader's understanding of the literary work.
There are quite a few types or schools of literary criticism/analysis. Here are 11 traditional approaches:
(Descriptions taken from MasterClass, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/literary-criticism).
As mentioned above, literary criticism can enhance your understanding of a work. In order to write your own critical essay, it can be very useful to find examples of other criticism that will help inform your position or perspective.
The many approaches to critical analysis provide a wide variety of ways to examine literary works, expanding your appreciation and understanding of literature in general.
Critical essays are usually found in scholarly journals, and many such journals can be explored from the Databases & Journals page in this guide. Here are some additional approaches to finding literary criticism:
For example, here is a search for "edgar allen poe" that also looks for "criticism" in the Subjects. Another approach is to expand the Subjects filter when viewing a list of results, then look for the subject terms "literary criticism," "criticism and interpretation," or "history and criticism" (see screenshot below). Select those checkboxes and click Apply Filters to further narrow your results.
Among the forms discussed on this page, reviews are likely the format you're most familiar with. Reviews are usually relatively short pieces that provide a qualitative assessment of a work (think "5-star review"). Often, reviewers also offer a recommendation (e.g., worth reading; if you like X, you'll like this, etc.) and express personal opinions (e.g., "I felt the author could have..." or 'I was surprised to find...'). Unlike critical analyses, which focus on a specific theme or topic within the work, reviews typically examine the work as a whole.
You are probably most familiar with book reviews, but there can also evaluative reviews written on scholarly articles.
Because they are usually written by experts in the same field as the work being evaluated, reviews can be incredibly useful during the research process. In addition to providing a summary of the work, reviews can identify factual inaccuracies, structural issues, whether the work adds to the field of research or simply repeats territory that has already been covered, and identify potential author bias.
You may be able to identify some of these things yourself, but getting the reviewer's perspective can be quite helpful in determining whether you want to use the book or article as a source for your own research.
Reviews can sometimes be tricky to identify, but SuperSearch does provide a method you can use. After searching for your work, author, or topic, look for "Reviews" in the Material Type filter on the left side of the screen:
A literature review, also called a review article or review of literature, surveys the existing research on a topic. The term "literature" in this context refers to published research or scholarship in a particular discipline, rather than "fiction" (like American Literature) or an individual work of literature. In general, literature reviews are more common in the sciences and social sciences, but they are written occasionally in the humanities.
Literature reviews may be written as standalone works, or as part of a scholarly article or research paper. In either case, the purpose of the review is to summarize and synthesize the key scholarly work that has already been done on the topic at hand. The literature review may also include some analysis and interpretation. A literature review is not a summary of every piece of scholarly research on a topic.
Literature reviews can be very helpful for newer researchers or those unfamiliar with a field by synthesizing the existing research on a given topic, providing the reader with connections and relationships among previous scholarship. Reviews can also be useful to veteran researchers by identifying potentials gaps in the research or steering future research questions toward unexplored areas. If a literature review is part of a scholarly article, it should include an explanation of how the current article adds to the conversation.
Reviews of literature are published in scholarly journals. In SuperSearch and most databases, select the Advanced Search mode and include "literature review" or "review of the literature" in addition to your other search terms. In the search results, some articles may include the phrase "systematic review," "review of literature," or "literature review" in the title or subtitle.
The library also subscribes to Annual Reviews, a database of publications dedicated to literature reviews in a variety of disciplines.
