literary analysis essay guide pdf

Literary Analysis Essay

Literary Analysis Essay Writing

Last updated on: May 21, 2023

Literary Analysis Essay - Ultimate Guide By Professionals

By: Cordon J.

Reviewed By: Rylee W.

Published on: Dec 3, 2019

A literary analysis essay specifically examines and evaluates a piece of literature or a literary work. It also understands and explains the links between the small parts to their whole information.

It is important for students to understand the meaning and the true essence of literature to write a literary essay.

One of the most difficult assignments for students is writing a literary analysis essay. It can be hard to come up with an original idea or find enough material to write about. You might think you need years of experience in order to create a good paper, but that's not true.

This blog post will show you how easy it can be when you follow the steps given here.Writing such an essay involves the breakdown of a book into small parts and understanding each part separately. It seems easy, right?

Trust us, it is not as hard as good book reports but it may also not be extremely easy. You will have to take into account different approaches and explain them in relation with the chosen literary work.

It is a common high school and college assignment and you can learn everything in this blog.

Continue reading for some useful tips with an example to write a literary analysis essay that will be on point. You can also explore our detailed article on writing an analytical essay .

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What is a Literary Analysis Essay?

A literary analysis essay is an important kind of essay that focuses on the detailed analysis of the work of literature.

The purpose of a literary analysis essay is to explain why the author has used a specific theme for his work. Or examine the characters, themes, literary devices , figurative language, and settings in the story.

This type of essay encourages students to think about how the book or the short story has been written. And why the author has created this work.

The method used in the literary analysis essay differs from other types of essays. It primarily focuses on the type of work and literature that is being analyzed.

Mostly, you will be going to break down the work into various parts. In order to develop a better understanding of the idea being discussed, each part will be discussed separately.

The essay should explain the choices of the author and point of view along with your answers and personal analysis.

How To Write A Literary Analysis Essay

So how to start a literary analysis essay? The answer to this question is quite simple.

The following sections are required to write an effective literary analysis essay. By following the guidelines given in the following sections, you will be able to craft a winning literary analysis essay.

Introduction

The aim of the introduction is to establish a context for readers. You have to give a brief on the background of the selected topic.

It should contain the name of the author of the literary work along with its title. The introduction should be effective enough to grab the reader’s attention.

In the body section, you have to retell the story that the writer has narrated. It is a good idea to create a summary as it is one of the important tips of literary analysis.

Other than that, you are required to develop ideas and disclose the observed information related to the issue. The ideal length of the body section is around 1000 words.

To write the body section, your observation should be based on evidence and your own style of writing.

It would be great if the body of your essay is divided into three paragraphs. Make a strong argument with facts related to the thesis statement in all of the paragraphs in the body section.

Start writing each paragraph with a topic sentence and use transition words when moving to the next paragraph.

Summarize the important points of your literary analysis essay in this section. It is important to compose a short and strong conclusion to help you make a final impression of your essay.

Pay attention that this section does not contain any new information. It should provide a sense of completion by restating the main idea with a short description of your arguments. End the conclusion with your supporting details.

You have to explain why the book is important. Also, elaborate on the means that the authors used to convey her/his opinion regarding the issue.

For further understanding, here is a downloadable literary analysis essay outline. This outline will help you structure and format your essay properly and earn an A easily.

DOWNLOADABLE LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY OUTLINE (PDF)

Types of Literary Analysis Essay

• Close reading - This method involves attentive reading and detailed analysis. No need for a lot of knowledge and inspiration to write an essay that shows your creative skills.
• Theoretical - In this type, you will rely on theories related to the selected topic.
• Historical - This type of essay concerns the discipline of history. Sometimes historical analysis is required to explain events in detail.
• Applied - This type involves analysis of a specific issue from a practical perspective.
• Comparative - This type of writing is based on when two or more alternatives are compared

Examples of Literary Analysis Essay

Examples are great to understand any concept, especially if it is related to writing. Below are some great literary analysis essay examples that showcase how this type of essay is written.

A ROSE FOR EMILY LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

THE GREAT GATSBY LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

If you do not have experience in writing essays, this will be a very chaotic process for you. In that case, it is very important for you to conduct good research on the topic before writing.

There are two important points that you should keep in mind when writing a literary analysis essay.

First, remember that it is very important to select a topic in which you are interested. Choose something that really inspires you. This will help you to catch the attention of a reader.

The selected topic should reflect the main idea of writing. In addition to that, it should also express your point of view as well.

Another important thing is to draft a good outline for your literary analysis essay. It will help you to define a central point and division of this into parts for further discussion.

Literary Analysis Essay Topics

Literary analysis essays are mostly based on artistic works like books, movies, paintings, and other forms of art. However, generally, students choose novels and books to write their literary essays.

Some cool, fresh, and good topics and ideas are listed below:

• Role of the Three Witches in flaming Macbeth’s ambition.
• Analyze the themes of the Play Antigone,
• Discuss Ajax as a tragic hero.
• The Judgement of Paris: Analyze the Reasons and their Consequences.
• Oedipus Rex: A Doomed Son or a Conqueror?
• Describe the Oedipus complex and Electra complex in relation to their respective myths.
• Betrayal is a common theme of Shakespearean tragedies. Discuss
• Identify and analyze the traits of history in T.S Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’.
• Analyze the theme of identity crisis in The Great Gatsby.
• Analyze the writing style of Emily Dickinson.

If you are still in doubt then there is nothing bad in getting professional writers’ help.

We at 5StarEssays.com can help you get a custom paper as per your specified requirements with our do essay for me service.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What should a literary analysis essay include.

A good literary analysis essay must include a proper and in-depth explanation of your ideas. They must be backed with examples and evidence from the text. Textual evidence includes summaries, paraphrased text, original work details, and direct quotes.

What are the 4 components of literary analysis?

Here are the 4 essential parts of a literary analysis essay;

No literary work is explained properly without discussing and explaining these 4 things.

How do you start a literary analysis essay?

Start your literary analysis essay with the name of the work and the title. Hook your readers by introducing the main ideas that you will discuss in your essay and engage them from the start.

How do you do a literary analysis?

In a literary analysis essay, you study the text closely, understand and interpret its meanings. And try to find out the reasons behind why the author has used certain symbols, themes, and objects in the work.

Why is literary analysis important?

It encourages the students to think beyond their existing knowledge, experiences, and belief and build empathy. This helps in improving the writing skills also.

What is the fundamental characteristic of a literary analysis essay?

Interpretation is the fundamental and important feature of a literary analysis essay. The essay is based on how well the writer explains and interprets the work.

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Cordon. is a published author and writing specialist. He has worked in the publishing industry for many years, providing writing services and digital content. His own writing career began with a focus on literature and linguistics, which he continues to pursue. Cordon is an engaging and professional individual, always looking to help others achieve their goals.

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Literary analysis: sample essay.

We turn once more to Joanna Wolfe’s and Laura Wilder’s  Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Analysis  (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016) in order to show you their example of a strong student essay that has a strong central claim elucidated by multiple surface/depth arguments supported by patterns of evidence.

Paragraph 1

Sylvia Plath’s short poem “Morning Song” explores the conflicted emotions of a new mother. On the one hand, the mother recognizes that she is expected to treasure and celebrate her infant, but on the other hand, she feels strangely removed from the child. The poem uses a combination of scientific and natural imagery to illustrate the mother’s feelings of alienation. By the end of the poem, however, we see a shift in this imagery as the mother begins to see the infant in more human terms.

Paragraph 2

There are several references to scientific imagery in “Morning Song” that suggest that mother is viewing the baby in clinical, scientific terms rather than as a new life. The poem refers to magnification (4) and reflection (8), both of which are scientific methods. The word “distills” (8) refers to a scientific, chemical process for removing impurities from a substance. The baby’s cry is described as taking “its place among the elements” (3), which seems to refer to the periodic table of elements, the primordial matter of the universe. The watch in the first line is similarly a scientific tool and the gold the watch is made of is, of course, an element, like the baby’s cry. Even the balloons in the last line have a scientific connotation since balloons are often used for measurements and experiments in science. These images all serve to show how the speaker feels distanced from the baby, who is like a scientific experiment she is conducting rather than a human being.

Paragraph 3

Natural imagery also seems to further dehumanize the baby, reducing it to nothing more than its mouth. The baby’s breathing is compared to a moth in line 10, suggesting that the speaker feels the infant is fragile and is as likely to die as a moth dancing around candlelight. A few lines later, the baby’s mouth is compared to another animal—a cat—who greedily opens its mouth for milk. Not only does the speaker seem to feel that the baby is like an animal, but she herself is turned into an animal, as she arises “cow-heavy” (13) to feed the infant. These images show how the speaker sees both the baby and herself as dumb animals who exist only to feed and be fed. Even the morning itself seems to be reduced to another mouth to feed as she describes how the dawn “swallows its dull stars” (16). These lines suggest that just as the sun swallows up the stars, so the baby will swallow up this mother.

Paragraph 4

However, in the last few lines the poem takes a hopeful turn as the speaker begins to view the baby as a human being. The baby’s mouth, which has previously been greedy and animal-like, now becomes a source of music, producing a “handful of notes” (17) and “clear vowels” (18). Music is a distinctly human sound. No animals and certainly not the cats, cows, or moths mentioned earlier in the poem, make music. This change in how the speaker perceives the baby’s sounds—from animalistic cry to human song—suggest that she is beginning to relate the baby as an individual. Even the word “handful” in the phrase “handful of notes” (17) seems hopeful in this context since this is the first time the mother has referred to the baby as having a distinctly human body part. When the baby’s notes finally “rise like balloons” (18), the speaker seems to have arrived at a place where she can celebrate the infant. For the first time, the infant is giving something to the speaker rather than threatening to take something away. The mother seems to have finally accepted the child as an independent human being whose company she can celebrate.

Works Cited

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Dr. Sandi Van Lieu

**For a video overview of this essay, see further down on this page.

Video Overview:

Attributions

• Images and video created by Dr. Sandi Van Lieu and licensed under CC BY NC SA.
• Student essay example by Janelle Devin and used with permission.

The RoughWriter's Guide Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Sandi Van Lieu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Making Literary Analysis Engaging With Student-Created Companion Books

Literary analysis is rarely students’ favorite task, but having them write for their peers can make it more engaging.

The literary analysis essay is rarely a favorite among English language arts (ELA) teachers and their students. Creativity, student choice, relevance, and authentic audience seem more difficult to incorporate into this traditional, though ubiquitous, genre. 

This challenge is partly because students’ analytical essays rarely have an audience or purpose beyond the English classroom. I’ve tackled this challenge by incorporating technology and student collaboration, inviting students to create guidebooks or companion books for literature.

Many teachers have developed and adapted the companion book strategy to suit their goals and needs, but the following approach is what I’ve found most successful. The activity has made literary analysis a favorite among my students.

Companion Book Basics

Companion books accompany and elaborate on already-published texts (books, series, movies, video games, or TV shows). They target an audience who has already read—and enjoyed—the text but want to know more about it or wish it never ended. 

Companion books aim to provide readers a deeper understanding of concepts in the original work. They give information and teach readers about ideas, concepts, or references they may have missed. Fans of many famous series ( Star Wars , Harry Potter , Marvel comics, etc.) have long made companion books, like the subgenre of “ fanfic ” that supplements these popular texts.

How to make it work

While students will likely balk at the task of writing an essay on the theme of The Outsiders , an assignment to collaborate with classmates and contribute a few chapters for a companion book to The Outsiders can almost sound fun, especially if students get to choose the focus of their own chapters (e.g., “Symbolism and Staying Gold” and “Foreshadowing Death”). I have my students draft a few potential tables of contents for their collaborative companion books and then divvy up the chapters based on who wants to write what. This way, I can still give them individual grades based only on their contributed chapters. 

It’s all the more enjoyable and meaningful if they are able to publish their work. I find Canva for Education is ideal, but I’ve also used Book Creator and other means of publication both digitally and in print. Our librarian supports our book-signing events in the school library, complete with barcoding and shelving students’ companion books—making them real, published authors who are searchable in our library database. I get to enjoy watching current students find and read the companion books of previous students on the library shelves.

Where to start

My favorite way to make this project a success is to have my students do this writing without even knowing it; by the time I present them with the task to write an entire companion book, the bulk of their writing is already done. 

I have them capture some written thoughts as they read a text (be it a whole-class novel, literature circle book, or independent choice book), but I never collect or grade this writing. I call it their “Deep Thoughts Notebook,” and I typically use Notice & Note signposts or other prompts that can work with any text to elicit deep thinking about reading—not just surface-level summaries. 

It’s downright fun when I task students with writing an entire book (cue tween outrage) and then tell them the good news that they’ve pretty much already written it. Each entry in their notebooks could easily become an interesting chapter in a companion book, and they’ve already quoted, cited, and elaborated on their unique thoughts about the text.

Infinite possibilities

Companion books are versatile and easily adaptable. The simplest way to incorporate collaborative companion books into the ELA classroom is with a whole-class novel. (My students have written companion books titled Inside The Outsiders , To Kill a Mockingbird: A Companion , and Everyone’s Monster: A Guide to A Monster Calls ).  

However, I do very few whole-class novel studies and have still used companion books to suit many ELA endeavors in lieu of the formal, traditional literary analysis essay. Companion books work with literature circles, short stories, author studies, and more. This year, I even had two seventh-grade ultra-fans of the Wings of Fire books write their own companion guide to this series, which they read independently throughout the year; they’d never been more motivated or productive readers and writers. 

What’s more, companion books don’t need to be collaborative. Individual students can work throughout the year on their book as a long-term project. 

Final tip for success

Be sure to clarify that the purpose of a companion book is not to simply summarize the original text. The content of companion books should look much more like a formal literary analysis than a book report. To engender the depth and quality of writing comparable to that of a literary analysis essay, provide examples of companion books, and have students determine how they are similar to and different from other forms of writing. 

Students should be able to readily observe that companion books do very little summarizing and instead function much like analysis—they cite and elaborate on direct quotes from the text that are highly relevant to the particular focus of the chapter, and they are bookended by a formal introduction and conclusion, to name just several features. 

I like to help students embrace the specific purpose and audience of companion books by explaining what I call the “ Easter egg effect.” I tell them: “Your readers don’t need you to tell them the basics of the text—they already know the main characters and setting and plot. But what did you notice, and think they probably missed? A true analysis reveals something through detailed examination. What’s your hot take? What Easter eggs will your writing reveal?” 

This framing focuses both their reading of the text and their writing about it.

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A Guide to Writing the Literary Analysis Essay

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