How to write a literary analysis essay
Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. Writers can apply literary analysis to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.
A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis. It is a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the text's language, perspective, and structure and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.
Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it's essential to carefully read the text and develop a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay:
- An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
- The main body is divided into paragraphs that build an argument using the text's evidence.
- A conclusion clearly states the main point you have shown with your analysis.
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Step-by-step guide of writing a literary essay
Step 1:
Reading the text and identifying literary devices.
The initial step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in writing. These are things you can dig into in your literary essay analysis.
Your goal in literary essay analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. You are overly looking out for literary devices and textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you are comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.
To get started with your literary essay analysis, there are several crucial areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.
Language choices for your literary essay
Consider what style of language the writer uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?
What word choices stand out as interesting or complex? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes using things like metaphor and simile.
Also, keep an eye out for imagery in the text. These are the recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.
Narrative voice
Begin by asking yourself:
- Who is telling the narrative?
- How are they telling it?
Is it a first-person narrator ("I") who is personally involved in the story or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from afar?
Consider the narrator's perspective. Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they unreliable narrators who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.
The tone of the essay is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?
Literary essay Structure
Consider how the text is structured and how the structure relates to the narrative being told.
- Novels are often divided into chapters and sections
- Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometimes cantos.
- Plays are divided into scenes and acts.
Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the essay in the way they did.
There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?
With poetry, consider how the meter and rhyme shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of how it feels.
In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes and how the setting relates to the action in the play. Watch out for dramatic irony, where the audience knows some detail that the characters don't, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.
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Step 2: Coming up with a thesis statement
Your thesis statement in a literary analysis essay is the primary point you want to make about the text. The core argument gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random thoughts about a text.
If you're given a prompt for your literary essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:
Sometimes you'll be given the freedom to choose your topic; in this case, you'll have to come up with an original thesis statement. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.
Your thesis statement should be arguable. It should be something that you think is true about the text but is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.
Say you're analyzing the novel, Frankenstein. You could start by asking yourself:
How is the character of Frankenstein portrayed?
Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:
The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis statement. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:
Example thesis statement for a literary analysis essay
Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature's narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.
Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process, so it doesn't need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.
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Finding textual evidence
Your essay will build a thesis argument using textual evidence to support your thesis statement—specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence should be quoted and analyzed throughout your literary essay to explain your argument to the reader.
It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find. You may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you structure your arguments and assess whether they're convincing.
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Step 3: Writing a title and introduction
To start your literary analysis paper, you'll need two things: a good title and an introduction.
Literary essays titles
Your literary essay title should indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the author's name and text(s) you're analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.
A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.
If you struggle to develop a good title at first, don't worry—this will be easier once you've begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.
Example title for a literary analysis essay
"Fearful symmetry": The violence of creation in William Blake's "The Tyger."
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The introduction
The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay's structure.
A typical structure for an introduction is, to begin with, a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.
Then you can end with a brief indication of what's coming up in the essay's main body. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but it shouldn't be more than one sentence in a short five-paragraph essay structure.
Example introduction for a literary analysis essay
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel.
This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature's narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.
This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature's perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume's narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.
Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it's not a bad idea. After all, you'll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you've begun writing them!
If you write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing and edit as necessary.
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Step 4:
Writing the body paragraph of the essay.
The body paragraphs of your essay are everything between the introduction and conclusion. They should contain comparative literature and the textual evidence that supports them.
Paragraph structure
A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five body paragraphs: the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.
Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don't try to include everything you can think of to say about the text-only analysis that drives your argument.
In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.
Topic sentences
To keep your points focused, it's important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.
A good topic sentence allows a reader to see what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like "however" or "moreover" are useful for creating smooth transitions.
Therefore, the story's focus is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door but upon the mundane process of ageing undergone by the man as he waits.
Nevertheless, the "radiance" that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.
This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word "nevertheless" points out a contrast with the previous paragraph's conclusion.
Using textual evidence
A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.
It's important to contextualize quotes and explain why you're using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:
Blake asks, "What dread hand" could have created the tiger, subverting the usual sense of joy in God's creation and conveying a sense of fearful awe instead.
It isn't always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when discussing the author's language, but sometimes you'll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can't be captured in a short quote.
In these cases, it's more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:
The initial and final sections of the novel consist of Walton's letters to his sister, and it is significant that Walton ostensibly transcribes the entirety of Frankenstein's and the creature's narratives in these letters.
Step 5:
Writing a literary essay conclusion.
The conclusion of your analysis shouldn't introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it's about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and emphasize their significance to the reader.
A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments and then stress the conclusion they've led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:
Significance
The conclusion ends by directly stating why this argument matters for understanding the novel's importance.
Example conclusion for a literary analysis essay
By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel's three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creatures accusatory voice and then in his voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive.
Far from the one-dimensional villain, he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein's narrative self-presentation responds to the images we see from others' perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley's unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for depicting the character.
