Literary analysis essay

A literary analysis essay is, as the name states, a text that analyzes a work of literature. The two significant terms here are literature and analyzes. Thus, this genre of writing looks intently at a specific work (or works) of literature - Such as a short story by Amy Tan, a tragedy by William Shakespeare, a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a novel by Toni Morrison, or a descriptive essay by Joan Didion - and then scruntizes it closely for insights, judgments, strategies, ideas, and on and on. Remember that this type of writing is not a summary of a literary text, though it certainly may be necessary to include summary remarks within your analysis to ensure that your reader knows or recalls the details of the text and, thus, can follow your discussion. However, the focus must always be upon analysis. Let's examine that difference between summary and analysis for a moment. Read the following passage from a student-written literary analysis essay on John Milton's seventeenth-century epic, Samson Agonistes: 

Samson is imprisoned in his own body by his blindness and is literally held in captivity by the Philistines. At the beginning of the poem, he exists also in a mental prison of depression and hopelessness. Samson, as a captive of the Philistines, is reduced physically to little more than a workhorse. His body and form are debased by servitude.

This passage, basically a summary of key details of the text, is provided to remind the reader of Samson's literal circumstances. The details of his blindness and his captivity are literally present in the epic. Now read another passage that occurs later within the same paper:

Each of the visitors presents Samson with a test or challenge. He passes them all, learning more about himself and his past, and arriving at a point that is stronger and clearer in purpose than before. Both his physical blindness and his confrontation with the mental blindness of the characters around him make inward clarity and illumination possible. Samson is able to evaluate, or re-see, his history. This reframing of history has enabled him to see a future in which he can fulfil God's prophecy.

In this passage, the writer is analyzing the character of Samson, offering an interpretation of his behaviour, and drawing conclusions about the value of his experiences. Those details are not stated literally within Milton's text. Rather, the writer creates that reading of the poem in her essay by scrutinizing passages, drawing connections between them, inferring certain changes, and so forth. The comments in the second passage are the work of literary analysis.

Though always focused upon analysis, this genre of essays can vary widely in its intended audiences, explicit purposes, and selected methods or approaches. Your audience will most often be a combination of your college peers and your professor(s). However, it may also consist of literary scholars if you are planning to present your text at a literary conference or submit your text to a journal for consideration for publication. Literary analyses can also serve varied purposes for both the writer and the reader. You may write or read primarily to explore the text itself for further insights, to demonstrate your detailed knowledge of the text to your audience, to form or understand an argument about a particular way to read the text, or to make connections to other works of literature or theories of literary study and so forth.

Primary approach

Let's examine some of the possible approaches to writing a literary analysis essay. All of these essays basically fall into one of two categories: You can write a completely self-created analysis, which uses only one source to write the essay - the primary source of the work of literature itself; or you can write an analysis that draws upon secondary sources, most commonly works of literary criticism, to aid you in your analysis. If you are directed to use outside sources such as critical essays found in literary journals that are written by professional scholars of literature, remember that you must credit the ideas you borrow from those scholars by properly citing them, both within the paper and in a fully documented list of sources in a reference list at the end of the paper. In this genre, you will nearly always be directed to use the conventions of MLA (Modern Language Association) style to format your essay and document your sources.

Secondary approach

Aside from those two broad divisions of using only the primary source for your analysis or augmenting it with secondary sources, there are several approaches you might take to structure your essay. One common approach is to do a close reading of textual features. With this method, you select one or more of the common literary elements such as plot, character, setting, theme, style, imagery, tone, etc.; trace their occurrence throughout the text; and then examine them closely to speculate on their meaning. For example, you might read the text for its use of figurative language, concentrate on character development, or focus on aspects of the setting (details of time and place) and examine their relevance to the overall message that seems to emerge from the text. Another method is commonly called a reader-response approach. Here you would concentrate on the text's effect on you as a reader, noting emotions it aroused and determining how that was accomplished, articulating connections that you made between the text and other experiences you have had outside of the text, or specifying what ideas you agree or disagree with within the text and so forth. Sometimes literary analysis essays demand an even more sophisticated approach. In Academia, it is very common to write an essay that assumes a particular critical perspective to analyze the text. For example, you might construct an interpretation of the text relative to feminist critical theory, viewing gender roles and stereotypes closely; examine the social-class issues of a text through a lens of cultural studies theory; draw on autobiographical criticism that provides crucial details about the author to help you analyze his/her text; and so forth. If your professor is expecting a specific critical frame such as one of these, you will surely be alerted to this. Such an analysis demands an understanding of that specific theoretical approach and ordinarily draws upon an array of scholarly secondary sources.

All of the approaches have something in common. A literary analysis forms an argument for a particular reading or interpretation of a work of literature. Consequently, in any literary analysis essay, you typically would be expected to formulate a thesis, which represents your major conclusion or interpretative statement about the text, and then to defend that thesis or controlling idea with details, examples, and formal arguments throughout the course of your essay. The thesis should be clearly stated early in the essay, most probably in the opening paragraph. It provides a road map for your reader in following your argument. Read the sections on Plan & discourse development & Structure for more information.

In this genre, however, the supports will be somewhat different. As discussed earlier in this section, they may come exclusively from the text itself and your own thoughts and previous experiences, or they may be supplemented by the thoughts and writings of others, usually literary scholars who write professional literary criticism. However, you may occasionally draw upon a journalist's comments in a book review or critique appearing in a general-interest source rather than a scholarly journal. One other crucial detail: Be sure that you clearly establish the title, author, edition, and genre of the specific work of literature you are exploring. Most likely you will include this information in your opening paragraph although some specific publication details, such as the precise edition, can simply be included in the Works Cited list.

The two sample essays in this section provide examples of close textual analyses of literary works. The first essay explores Milton's use of the imagery in his famous epic poem Samson Agonistes. While it is clear that this writer is familiar with other Miltonic works, the analysis does not draw on any secondary sources. Rather, the writer relies heavily upon the lines of the poem itself to trace the changes that occur in the main character, which are largely exemplified through the ironic play on the true nature of the words vision and blindness. The second essay examines the use of setting as an influential element in two different novels. This essay supports its thesis not only through the use of detailed examples from the text and original interpretation by the writer but also by integrating ideas of literary critics.