Literary Analysis Essays: Overview
In the most basic sense, analysis makes the world go around. After all, we need to be able to analyze our surroundings in order to survive. Because of our abilities to analyze things around us, we are able to get ourselves to campus or work every day because we understand that the red light means “stop” and the green light means “go,” and we understand why those symbols are important.
Analysis makes the world go around on a deeper level, too—in the sense that analysis is an essential part of human interaction. People are the most central figures of the human story. Being able to analyze people is crucial to how we understand the ways that human relationships shape all of our lives.
An essential component of human connection is literature—our narratives, plays, poetry, and shows. It is through our stories that we connect—to other people, to other places, and even to ourselves. Literature inspires us, helps us develop new perspectives when we look at the world around us, and fosters our ability to empathize. Therefore, the more skillfully we can analyze literature in our own writing, the better equipped we are to understand the world and how we all fit within it.
Literary analysis employs multiple modes of critical thought and writing, including summary, description, and analysis. In writing your literary interpretation essay, you will need to do the following:
- Summarize: What happens in this literary work?
- Describe: What are the components and details of this literary work?
- Analyze: What does this literary work mean?
Along with keeping these three overall goals in mind as you read and write about any piece of literature, it can be useful to know the language for how literature works. For help with that, you should reference a list of literary terms:
Key Features
Strong Thesis Statement That Establishes Analytical Claim
After reading the literary work you’re analyzing and you before you begin writing about it, you need to develop a uniquely focused thesis statement that makes an analytical claim. When coming up with your thesis statement about a literary work, you want your analysis to be relevant, focused, and unique. A strong thesis statement avoids the obvious. In other words, you won’t try to argue a conclusion that most readers could reach on their own from a general knowledge of the work.
In choosing a focus for your thesis, remember that you want your essay to be about something that matters—to you, to the human condition. This may involve larger issues that relate to social class, family dynamics, gender, race, economics, education, religion, psychology, politics, law, history, and so on.
What to Do and Not Do in a Literary Analysis Thesis Statement
A strong literary thesis statement should be:
- Debatable
- Example: “While most people reading Hamlet think he is the tragic hero, Ophelia is the real hero of the play as demonstrated through her critique of Elsinore’s court through the language of flowers.”
- This thesis takes a position that others could debate and argue against.
- Specific
- Example: Through his portrayal of contrasting river and shore scenes in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain suggests that to find the true expression of American ideals, one must leave ‘civilized’ society and go back to nature.
- While concise, this thesis clearly establishes the specific elements of analytical focus.
- Rooted in Observations about How the Literary Text Works
- Example: The simplistic symbolism of the letter “A” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter breaks down as the novel progresses, which illustrates the complexity of Hester and Pearl.
- This thesis identifies a specific way that the text works to establish, in this case, characterization.
A strong literary thesis statement should not be:
- Overly broad or generalized
- More about society than the work of literature
- A statement about history rather than about literature
- A summary or obvious statement about the text
- A simplistic evaluation or judgment about the quality of the work
- About the author rather than about the work of literature
In short, a strong literary analysis thesis statement should focus on analyzing specific elements of the literary work itself. The less direct focus given the literary work in the thesis, the more likely it’s not very effective at establishing a clear and debatable claim.
Clear Main Points Developed Across Body Paragraphs
One of the biggest challenges with analyzing literature is presenting an interpretive argument rather than just a summary or description of the literary work. While summarizing key details of the literary work is important to support your analysis, you should be careful to avoid over-summarizing and excluding your own analytical ideas.
Your goal should be to carefully identify the key details from the literary work that will serve as supporting evidence for your thesis. Once you’ve done that, your next step is to begin developing main points and body paragraphs around that evidence.
To keep your analysis on track, write analytical topic sentences for each body paragraph—each topic sentence should clearly connect back to your thesis in some way. Always remember that your thesis identifies your overall analysis, and your body paragraphs develop and flesh out the details of that analysis. If the topic sentences of your body paragraphs seem disconnected from your thesis statement, then your analysis is going off track.
Relevant Evidence from the Literary Work
Finding the best evidence starts with actively and carefully reading the text, a process covered in the Reading Critically chapter of this textbook.
As you start outlining and writing your essay, be sure to draw from the notes that you took while reading the literary work. When you begin to write about a text, you can look back through your notes for details or passages that relate to each other. Look for patterns in your notes, identify evidence that might support your analysis, and think critically about which specific pieces of the text you might present as evidence in your essay.
The bulk of an argument essay should be body paragraphs built around claims and evidence. While some body paragraphs might compare and contrast philosophical sides of an argument, some might use historical information, and some might examine current debates, each body paragraph should start with a clear claim and be supported by relevant evidence.
This process will involve including examples, passages, scenes, details, and quotations from the literary text in your essay. For help with quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing, you should check out the relevant sections withing the Writing With Research as a Process chapter of this textbook.
Keep in mind that your analysis is the star of the show. If you summarize and/or quote too much, you won’t be leaving enough room for you to develop your own ideas and interpretations about the literary text.
Detailed Analysis of the Literary Work
As already noted, most of your analysis will happen in your body paragraphs and be built around evidence from the literary work. But how do you know when you’ve written enough analysis to prove your thesis?
Begin by selecting a short passage (a key scene, a crucial conversation, or an opening or closing sentence or paragraph) that you believe supports your thesis. Quote or summarize keys details from this passage precisely. The next goal is to unfold the meaning of the specific evidence in the passage. Do not spend time summarizing the plot. Your writing should be focused on developing your idea (your analysis) when it comes to that passage. Don’t get sidetracked or introduce a new topic. Concentrate on analyzing the passage you have selected, analyzing it in order to support your argument.
One Useful Model for Writing Literary Analysis Body Paragraphs
- Topic Sentence: your topic sentence controls your paragraph, introducing one of the claims related to your thesis.
- Example: briefly contextualize the elements (who/what/when/where) from the passage of the literary work you are focusing on, and then present evidence from that passage of the literary work.
- Explanation: in your own words, explain what you specific details you believe are important in the evidence you have provided. You cannot assume that your readers will interpret the evidence in the same way as you—so you must explain the connections you want them to make.
- Tie it All Together: make sure the paragraph reads as a coherent whole before moving on to the next idea. Don’t restate exactly what you just said, but leave your reader with a powerful ending statement at the end of each paragraph
Citations
As we write literary analysis essays, we are often quoting and paraphrasing from literary works. This means including in-text citations as needed. For help with citing from a literary work, you should check out the In-Text Citations chapter in this textbook, which includes specific examples for how to cite from fiction, plays, and poems.
Drafting Checklists
These questions should help guide you through the stages of drafting your research essay.
Prewriting
- What will you choose as the main focus for your literary analysis essay?
- How will you develop analysis built around a clear and debatable thesis related to specific elements of the literary work you’ve chosen?
- What will become the focus of your thesis statement’s main claim?
- In other words, what aspects of the literary work will you be primarily focusing on throughout your essay’s analysis?
- What key passages from the literary work will provide you with supporting evidence?
- Are there key scenes, quotes, characters, or so on that will help demonstrate the main points of your analysis?
- How might you structure your literary analysis essay?
- What main points might you cover throughout your essay?
- How might your start your essay?
- How might you end your essay?
Writing and Revising
- Is your analytical thesis statement made clear early in your essay?
- Is your thesis specific, debatable, and clearly rooted in relevant evidence from the literary work?
- Have you briefly summarized key details of the plot and/or main themes of the literary work?
- Have you effectively structured your essay in a logical way that suits your topic and purpose?
- Have you clearly made connections between your overall thesis and main points?
- Have you presented evidence from the literary work in the best way to support your analysis?
- Is your analysis fully developed throughout your body paragraphs?
- Have you summarized too much evidence from the literary work? Not enough?
- Would your readers be confused at any point by your analysis?
- Have you correctly cited any and all evidence from the literary work?
- Have you created a correct works cited entry?
- Have you used signal phrases and in-text citations to integrate evidence into your essay?
Sources Used to Create this Chapter
Parts of this chapter were remixed from:
- Composition for Commodores: Reading, Writing, and Inquiry at Lorain County Community College (2nd Edition), by Mollie Chambers et. al., which was published under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
