All good writing about literature attempts to answer a question, spoken or unspoken, about the text:
Why does Hamlet hesitate for so long before killing his uncle?
How does street language function in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool”?
What does Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” imply about the role the British played in imperial India?
Why does the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, find Jay Gatsby so fascinating?
How does Dickens portray lawyers in Great Expectations?
What is the signifícance of blindness in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex?
How do rhyme and meter support the meaning of Blake’s “The Tyger”?
In what ways does James Joyce’s “The Dead” confront traditions of love and romance?
The goal of a literature paper should be to address such questions with a meaningful interpretation, presented forcefully and persuasively.
Developing a literary analysis paper
Planning an interpretation of literature
Writing a literature paper
Observing the conventions of literature papers
Integrating quotations from a literary work
Using MLA style for citing literary works
Documenting secondary sources
Avoiding plagiarism in literature papers
Sample literature papers