english literature essay university

How to Write a Good English Literature Essay

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

How do you write a good English Literature essay? Although to an extent this depends on the particular subject you’re writing about, and on the nature of the question your essay is attempting to answer, there are a few general guidelines for how to write a convincing essay – just as there are a few guidelines for writing well in any field.

We at Interesting Literature  call them ‘guidelines’ because we hesitate to use the word ‘rules’, which seems too programmatic. And as the writing habits of successful authors demonstrate, there is no  one way to become a good writer – of essays, novels, poems, or whatever it is you’re setting out to write. The French writer Colette liked to begin her writing day by picking the fleas off her cat.

Edith Sitwell, by all accounts, liked to lie in an open coffin before she began her day’s writing. Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk, claiming he needed the scent of their decay to help him write. (For most student essay-writers, such an aroma is probably allowed to arise in the writing-room more organically, over time.)

We will address our suggestions for successful essay-writing to the average student of English Literature, whether at university or school level. There are many ways to approach the task of essay-writing, and these are just a few pointers for how to write a better English essay – and some of these pointers may also work for other disciplines and subjects, too.

Of course, these guidelines are designed to be of interest to the non-essay-writer too – people who have an interest in the craft of writing in general. If this describes you, we hope you enjoy the list as well. Remember, though, everyone can find writing difficult: as Thomas Mann memorably put it, ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ Nora Ephron was briefer: ‘I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.’ So, the guidelines for successful essay-writing:

1. Planning is important, but don’t spend too long perfecting a structure that might end up changing.

This may seem like odd advice to kick off with, but the truth is that different approaches work for different students and essayists. You need to find out which method works best for you.

It’s not a bad idea, regardless of whether you’re a big planner or not, to sketch out perhaps a few points on a sheet of paper before you start, but don’t be surprised if you end up moving away from it slightly – or considerably – when you start to write.

Often the most extensively planned essays are the most mechanistic and dull in execution, precisely because the writer has drawn up a plan and refused to deviate from it. What  is a more valuable skill is to be able to sense when your argument may be starting to go off-topic, or your point is getting out of hand,  as you write . (For help on this, see point 5 below.)

We might even say that when it comes to knowing how to write a good English Literature essay,  practising  is more important than planning.

2. Make room for close analysis of the text, or texts.

Whilst it’s true that some first-class or A-grade essays will be impressive without containing any close reading as such, most of the highest-scoring and most sophisticated essays tend to zoom in on the text and examine its language and imagery closely in the course of the argument. (Close reading of literary texts arises from theology and the analysis of holy scripture, but really became a ‘thing’ in literary criticism in the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and other influential essayists started to subject the poem or novel to close scrutiny.)

Close reading has two distinct advantages: it increases the specificity of your argument (so you can’t be so easily accused of generalising a point), and it improves your chances of pointing up something about the text which none of the other essays your marker is reading will have said. For instance, take In Memoriam  (1850), which is a long Victorian poem by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson about his grief following the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in the early 1830s.

When answering a question about the representation of religious faith in Tennyson’s poem  In Memoriam  (1850), how might you write a particularly brilliant essay about this theme? Anyone can make a general point about the poet’s crisis of faith; but to look closely at the language used gives you the chance to show  how the poet portrays this.

For instance, consider this stanza, which conveys the poet’s doubt:

A solid and perfectly competent essay might cite this stanza in support of the claim that Tennyson is finding it increasingly difficult to have faith in God (following the untimely and senseless death of his friend, Arthur Hallam). But there are several ways of then doing something more with it. For instance, you might get close to the poem’s imagery, and show how Tennyson conveys this idea, through the image of the ‘altar-stairs’ associated with religious worship and the idea of the stairs leading ‘thro’ darkness’ towards God.

In other words, Tennyson sees faith as a matter of groping through the darkness, trusting in God without having evidence that he is there. If you like, it’s a matter of ‘blind faith’. That would be a good reading. Now, here’s how to make a good English essay on this subject even better: one might look at how the word ‘falter’ – which encapsulates Tennyson’s stumbling faith – disperses into ‘falling’ and ‘altar’ in the succeeding lines. The word ‘falter’, we might say, itself falters or falls apart.

That is doing more than just interpreting the words: it’s being a highly careful reader of the poetry and showing how attentive to the language of the poetry you can be – all the while answering the question, about how the poem portrays the idea of faith. So, read and then reread the text you’re writing about – and be sensitive to such nuances of language and style.

The best way to  become attuned to such nuances is revealed in point 5. We might summarise this point as follows: when it comes to knowing how to write a persuasive English Literature essay, it’s one thing to have a broad and overarching argument, but don’t be afraid to use the  microscope as well as the telescope.

3. Provide several pieces of evidence where possible.

Many essays have a point to make and make it, tacking on a single piece of evidence from the text (or from beyond the text, e.g. a critical, historical, or biographical source) in the hope that this will be enough to make the point convincing.

‘State, quote, explain’ is the Holy Trinity of the Paragraph for many. What’s wrong with it? For one thing, this approach is too formulaic and basic for many arguments. Is one quotation enough to support a point? It’s often a matter of degree, and although one piece of evidence is better than none, two or three pieces will be even more persuasive.

After all, in a court of law a single eyewitness account won’t be enough to convict the accused of the crime, and even a confession from the accused would carry more weight if it comes supported by other, objective evidence (e.g. DNA, fingerprints, and so on).

Let’s go back to the example about Tennyson’s faith in his poem  In Memoriam  mentioned above. Perhaps you don’t find the end of the poem convincing – when the poet claims to have rediscovered his Christian faith and to have overcome his grief at the loss of his friend.

You can find examples from the end of the poem to suggest your reading of the poet’s insincerity may have validity, but looking at sources beyond the poem – e.g. a good edition of the text, which will contain biographical and critical information – may help you to find a clinching piece of evidence to support your reading.

And, sure enough, Tennyson is reported to have said of  In Memoriam : ‘It’s too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself.’ And there we have it: much more convincing than simply positing your reading of the poem with a few ambiguous quotations from the poem itself.

Of course, this rule also works in reverse: if you want to argue, for instance, that T. S. Eliot’s  The Waste Land is overwhelmingly inspired by the poet’s unhappy marriage to his first wife, then using a decent biographical source makes sense – but if you didn’t show evidence for this idea from the poem itself (see point 2), all you’ve got is a vague, general link between the poet’s life and his work.

Show  how the poet’s marriage is reflected in the work, e.g. through men and women’s relationships throughout the poem being shown as empty, soulless, and unhappy. In other words, when setting out to write a good English essay about any text, don’t be afraid to  pile on  the evidence – though be sensible, a handful of quotations or examples should be more than enough to make your point convincing.

4. Avoid tentative or speculative phrasing.

Many essays tend to suffer from the above problem of a lack of evidence, so the point fails to convince. This has a knock-on effect: often the student making the point doesn’t sound especially convinced by it either. This leaks out in the telling use of, and reliance on, certain uncertain  phrases: ‘Tennyson might have’ or ‘perhaps Harper Lee wrote this to portray’ or ‘it can be argued that’.

An English university professor used to write in the margins of an essay which used this last phrase, ‘What  can’t be argued?’

This is a fair criticism: anything can be argued (badly), but it depends on what evidence you can bring to bear on it (point 3) as to whether it will be a persuasive argument. (Arguing that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a Martian who came down to Earth and ingratiated himself with the world of Elizabethan theatre is a theory that can be argued, though few would take it seriously. We wish we could say ‘none’, but that’s a story for another day.)

Many essay-writers, because they’re aware that texts are often open-ended and invite multiple interpretations (as almost all great works of literature invariably do), think that writing ‘it can be argued’ acknowledges the text’s rich layering of meaning and is therefore valid.

Whilst this is certainly a fact – texts are open-ended and can be read in wildly different ways – the phrase ‘it can be argued’ is best used sparingly if at all. It should be taken as true that your interpretation is, at bottom, probably unprovable. What would it mean to ‘prove’ a reading as correct, anyway? Because you found evidence that the author intended the same thing as you’ve argued of their text? Tennyson wrote in a letter, ‘I wrote In Memoriam  because…’?

But the author might have lied about it (e.g. in an attempt to dissuade people from looking too much into their private life), or they might have changed their mind (to go back to the example of  The Waste Land : T. S. Eliot championed the idea of poetic impersonality in an essay of 1919, but years later he described  The Waste Land as ‘only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life’ – hardly impersonal, then).

Texts – and their writers – can often be contradictory, or cagey about their meaning. But we as critics have to act responsibly when writing about literary texts in any good English essay or exam answer. We need to argue honestly, and sincerely – and not use what Wikipedia calls ‘weasel words’ or hedging expressions.

So, if nothing is utterly provable, all that remains is to make the strongest possible case you can with the evidence available. You do this, not only through marshalling the evidence in an effective way, but by writing in a confident voice when making your case. Fundamentally, ‘There is evidence to suggest that’ says more or less the same thing as ‘It can be argued’, but it foregrounds the  evidence rather than the argument, so is preferable as a phrase.

This point might be summarised by saying: the best way to write a good English Literature essay is to be honest about the reading you’re putting forward, so you can be confident in your interpretation and use clear, bold language. (‘Bold’ is good, but don’t get too cocky, of course…)

5. Read the work of other critics.

This might be viewed as the Holy Grail of good essay-writing tips, since it is perhaps the single most effective way to improve your own writing. Even if you’re writing an essay as part of school coursework rather than a university degree, and don’t need to research other critics for your essay, it’s worth finding a good writer of literary criticism and reading their work. Why is this worth doing?

Published criticism has at least one thing in its favour, at least if it’s published by an academic press or has appeared in an academic journal, and that is that it’s most probably been peer-reviewed, meaning that other academics have read it, closely studied its argument, checked it for errors or inaccuracies, and helped to ensure that it is expressed in a fluent, clear, and effective way.

If you’re serious about finding out how to write a better English essay, then you need to study how successful writers in the genre do it. And essay-writing is a genre, the same as novel-writing or poetry. But why will reading criticism help you? Because the critics you read can show you how to do all of the above: how to present a close reading of a poem, how to advance an argument that is not speculative or tentative yet not over-confident, how to use evidence from the text to make your argument more persuasive.

And, the more you read of other critics – a page a night, say, over a few months – the better you’ll get. It’s like textual osmosis: a little bit of their style will rub off on you, and every writer learns by the examples of other writers.

As T. S. Eliot himself said, ‘The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad.’ Don’t get precious about your own distinctive writing style and become afraid you’ll lose it. You can’t  gain a truly original style before you’ve looked at other people’s and worked out what you like and what you can ‘steal’ for your own ends.

We say ‘steal’, but this is not the same as saying that plagiarism is okay, of course. But consider this example. You read an accessible book on Shakespeare’s language and the author makes a point about rhymes in Shakespeare. When you’re working on your essay on the poetry of Christina Rossetti, you notice a similar use of rhyme, and remember the point made by the Shakespeare critic.

This is not plagiarising a point but applying it independently to another writer. It shows independent interpretive skills and an ability to understand and apply what you have read. This is another of the advantages of reading critics, so this would be our final piece of advice for learning how to write a good English essay: find a critic whose style you like, and study their craft.

If you’re looking for suggestions, we can recommend a few favourites: Christopher Ricks, whose  The Force of Poetry is a tour de force; Jonathan Bate, whose  The Genius of Shakespeare , although written for a general rather than academic audience, is written by a leading Shakespeare scholar and academic; and Helen Gardner, whose  The Art of T. S. Eliot , whilst dated (it came out in 1949), is a wonderfully lucid and articulate analysis of Eliot’s poetry.

James Wood’s How Fiction Works  is also a fine example of lucid prose and how to close-read literary texts. Doubtless readers of  Interesting Literature will have their own favourites to suggest in the comments, so do check those out, as these are just three personal favourites. What’s your favourite work of literary scholarship/criticism? Suggestions please.

Much of all this may strike you as common sense, but even the most commonsensical advice can go out of your mind when you have a piece of coursework to write, or an exam to revise for. We hope these suggestions help to remind you of some of the key tenets of good essay-writing practice – though remember, these aren’t so much commandments as recommendations. No one can ‘tell’ you how to write a good English Literature essay as such.

But it can be learned. And remember, be interesting – find the things in the poems or plays or novels which really ignite your enthusiasm. As John Mortimer said, ‘The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.’

Finally, good luck – and happy writing!

And if you enjoyed these tips for how to write a persuasive English essay, check out our advice for how to remember things for exams  and our tips for becoming a better close reader of poetry .

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30 thoughts on “How to Write a Good English Literature Essay”

You must have taken AP Literature. I’m always saying these same points to my students.

I also think a crucial part of excellent essay writing that too many students do not realize is that not every point or interpretation needs to be addressed. When offered the chance to write your interpretation of a work of literature, it is important to note that there of course are many but your essay should choose one and focus evidence on this one view rather than attempting to include all views and evidence to back up each view.

Reblogged this on SocioTech'nowledge .

Not a bad effort…not at all! (Did you intend “subject” instead of “object” in numbered paragraph two, line seven?”

Oops! I did indeed – many thanks for spotting. Duly corrected ;)

That’s what comes of writing about philosophy and the subject/object for another post at the same time!

Reblogged this on Scribing English .

• Pingback: Recommended Resource: Interesting Literature.com & how to write an essay | Write Out Loud

Great post on essay writing! I’ve shared a post about this and about the blog site in general which you can look at here: http://writeoutloudblog.com/2015/01/13/recommended-resource-interesting-literature-com-how-to-write-an-essay/

All of these are very good points – especially I like 2 and 5. I’d like to read the essay on the Martian who wrote Shakespeare’s plays).

Reblogged this on Uniqely Mustered and commented: Dedicate this to all upcoming writers and lovers of Writing!

I shall take this as my New Year boost in Writing Essays. Please try to visit often for corrections,advise and criticisms.

Reblogged this on Blue Banana Bread .

Reblogged this on worldsinthenet .

All very good points, but numbers 2 and 4 are especially interesting.

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Reblogged this on rainniewu .

Reblogged this on pixcdrinks .

• Pingback: How to Write a Good English Essay? Interesting Literature | EngLL.Com

Great post. Interesting infographic how to write an argumentative essay http://www.essay-profy.com/blog/how-to-write-an-essay-writing-an-argumentative-essay/

Reblogged this on DISTINCT CHARACTER and commented: Good Tips

Reblogged this on quirkywritingcorner and commented: This could be applied to novel or short story writing as well.

Reblogged this on rosetech67 and commented: Useful, albeit maybe a bit late for me :-)

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A well rounded summary on all steps to keep in mind while starting on writing. There are many new avenues available though. Benefit from the writing options of the 21st century from here, i loved it! http://authenticwritingservices.com

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Anthony Cockerill

| Writing | The written word | Teaching English |

How to write great English literature essays at university

Essential advice on how to craft a great english literature essay at university – and how to avoid rookie mistakes..

If you’ve just begun to study English literature at university, the prospect of writing that first essay can be daunting. Tutors will likely offer little in the way of assistance in the process of planning and writing, as it’s assumed that students know how to do this already. At A-level, teachers are usually very clear with students about the Assessment Objectives for examination components and centre-assessed work, but it can feel like there’s far less clarity around how essays are marked at university. Furthermore, the process of learning how to properly reference an essay can be a steep learning curve.

But essentially, there are five things you’re being asked to do: show your understanding of the text and its key themes, explore the writer’s methods, consider the influence of contextual factors that might influence the writing and reading of the text, read published critical work about the text and incorporate this discourse into your essay, and finally, write a coherent argument in response to the task.

With advice from English teachers, HE tutors and other people who’ve been there and done it, here are the most crucial things to remember when planning and writing an essay.

Read around the subject and let your argument evolve.

‘One of the big step-ups from A-level, where students might only have had to deal with critical material as part of their coursework, is the move toward engaging with the critical debate around a text.’

Reading around the task and making notes is all important. Get familiar with the reading list. Become adept at searching for critical material in books and articles that’s not on the reading list. Talk with the librarian. Make sure you can find your way around the stacks. Get log-ins for the various databases of online criticism, such as the MLA International Bibliography .

‘Tutors are looking for flair… for students to be nuanced and creative with their ideas as opposed to reproducing the same criticism that others already have.’

When reading, keep notes, make summaries and write down useful quotations. Make sure you keep track of what you’ve read as you go. Note the publication details (author, publisher, year and place of publication). If you write down a quotation, note the page number. This will make dealing with citations and writing your bibliography much easier later on, as there’s nothing more annoying than getting to the end of the first draft of your essay and realising you’ve no idea which book or article a quote came from or which page it was on.

‘The more I read, the sharper my own writing style became because I developed an opinion of the writing style I liked and I had a clear sense of the subject matter that I was discussing.’

‘Don’t wing the reading. Or the thinking. Crap writing emerges from style over substance.’

Get to grips with the question and plan a response.

‘Brain dump at the start in the form of a mind map. This will help you focus and relax. You can add to it as go along and can shape it into a brief plan.’

Before writing a single word, brainstorm. Do some free-thinking. Get your ideas down on paper or sticky notes. Cross things out; refine. Allow your planning to be led by ideas that support your argument.

Use different colour-coded sticky notes for your planning. In the example below, the student has used yellow sticky notes for ideas, blue for language, structure and methods, purple for context and green for literary criticism, which makes planning the sequence of the essay much easier.

Structure and sequence your ideas

‘Make your argument clear in your opening paragraph, and then ensure that every subsequent paragraph is clearly addressing your thesis.’

Plan the essay by working out a sequence of your ideas that you believe to be the most compelling. Allow your ideas to serve as structural signposts. Augment these with relevant criticism, context and focus on language and style.

‘Read wide and look at different pieces of criticism of a particular work and weave that in with your own interpretation of said work.’

Write a great introduction.

‘By the end of the first paragraph, make sure you have established a very clear thesis statement that outlines the main thrust of the essay.’

Your introduction should make your argument very clear. It’s also a chance to establish working definitions of any problematic terms and to engage with key aspects of the wider critical debate.

Get to grips with academic style and draft the essay

‘[Write with] an ‘exploratory’ tone rather than ‘dogmatic’ one.’

Academic writing is characterised by argument, analysis and evaluation. In an earlier post , I explored how students in high school might improve their analytical writing by adopting three maxims. These maxims are just as helpful for undergraduates. Firstly, aim for precise, cogent expression. Secondly, deliver an individual response supported by your reading – and citing – of published literary criticism. Thirdly, work on your personal voice. In formal analytical writing such as the university essay, your personal voice might be constrained rather more than it would be in a blog or a review, but it must nonetheless be exploratory in tone. Tentativity can be an asset as it suggests appreciation of nuances and alternative ways of thinking.

‘I got to grips with what was being asked of me by reading lots of literary criticism and becoming more familiar with academic writing conventions.’

Avoid unnecessary or clunky sign-post phrases such as ‘in this essay, I am going to…’ or ‘a further thing…’ A transition devices that can work really well is the explicit paragraph link, in which a motif or phrase in the last sentence of a paragraph is repeated in the first sentence of the next paragraph.

Write a killer conclusion

‘There is more emphasis on finding your own voice at university, something which in many ways is inhibited by Assessment Objectives at A-Level. I don’t think ‘good’ academic writing is necessarily taught very well in schools — at least from my experience.’

The conclusion is a really important part of your essay. It’s a chance to restate your thesis and to draw conclusions. You might achieve closure or instead, allude to interesting questions or ideas the essay has perhaps raised but not answered. You might synthesise your argument by exploring the key issue. You could zoom-out and explore the issue as part of a bigger picture.

Be meticulous in your referencing.

Having supported your argument with quotations from published critics, it’s important to be meticulous about how you reference these, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism – passing someone else’s work off as your own. There are three broad ways of referencing: author-date, footnote and endnote. However, within each of these three approaches, there are specific named protocols. Most English literature faculties use either the MLA (Modern Languages Association of America) style or the Harvard style (variants of the author-date approach). It’s important to check what your faculty or department uses, learn how to use it (faculties invariably publish guidance, but ask if you’re unsure) and apply the rules meticulously.

‘Read your work aloud, slowly, sentence by sentence. It’s the best way to spot typos, and it allows you to hear what is awkward and/or ungrammatical. Then read the essay aloud again.’

Write with precision. Use a thesaurus to help you find the right word, but make sure you use it properly and in the right context. Read sentences back and prune unnecessary phrases or redundant words. Similarly, avoid words or phrases which might sound self-important or pompous.

Like those structural signposts that don’t really add anything, some phrases need to be omited, such as ‘many people have argued that…’ or ‘futher to the previous paragraph…’.

Finally, make sure the essay is formatted correctly. University departments are usually clear about their expectations, but font, size, and line spacing are usually stipulated along with any other information you’re expected to include in the essay’s header or footer. And don’t expect the proofing tool to pick up every mistake.

Featured image by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

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English literature essays, an english literature essay archive, written by our students, with subjects ranging from shakespeare to artistotle, and from dickens to hemingway, essay subjects in alphabetical order:.

• Aristotle: Poetics

Margaret Atwood

Margaret atwood 'gertrude talks back'.

• Matthew Arnold

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress and Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

• Jonathan Bayliss
• Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett
• Saul Bellow and Ken Kesey
• Castiglione: The Courtier
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
• Kate Chopin: The Awakening
• T S Eliot, Albert Camus
• Charles Dickens
• John Donne: Love poetry
• John Dryden: Translation of Ovid
• T S Eliot: Four Quartets
• Henry Fielding
• William Faulkner: Sartoris
• Graham Greene: Brighton Rock
• Ibsen, Lawrence, Galsworthy
• Jonathan Swift and John Gay
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Ernest Hemingway
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

• Carl Gustav Jung

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

• Jon Jost: American independent film-maker
• Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming
• Rudyard Kipling: Kim
• D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love

Henry Lawson: 'Eureka!'

• Ian McEwan: The Cement Garden
• Jennifer Maiden: The Winter Baby
• Machiavelli: The Prince
• Toni Morrison: Beloved and Jazz

R K Narayan

• R K Narayan: The English Teacher
• R K Narayan: The Guide
• Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
• Brian Patten
• Harold Pinter
• Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

• Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene
• Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
• Shakespeare: Coriolanus
• Shakespeare: Hamlet
• Shakespeare: Measure for Measure

Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Women

Shakespeare: the winter's tale and the tempest.

• Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
• Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella
• Tom Stoppard

William Styron: Sophie's Choice

• William Wordsworth

Miscellaneous

• Alice, Harry Potter and the computer game

Indian women's writing

• New York! New York!
• Photography and the New Native American Aesthetic
• Renaissance poetry
• Renaissance tragedy and investigator heroes
• Romanticism
• Studying English Literature
• The Age of Reason
• The author, the text, and the reader
• The Spy in the Computer
• What is literary writing?
• Margaret Atwood: Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale
• Margaret Atwood 'Gertrude Talks Back'
• John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress and Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Will McManus
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ian Mackean
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ben Foley
• Henry Lawson: 'Eureka!'
• R K Narayan's vision of life
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Doubles
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Symbolism
• Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Women
• Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale and The Tempest
• William Wordsworth and Lucy
• Indian women's writing

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• Knowledge Base
• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just 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 language, perspective, and structure of the text, 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 c ome up with 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.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary 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. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key 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

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—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

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• 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 a distance?

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 an unreliable narrator 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 text 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)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text 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 it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. 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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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. 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 should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which 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:

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. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

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 own 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.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your 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, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author 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 come up with 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.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

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 main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

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 own 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 do 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.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five 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.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

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 at a glance 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:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging 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:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re 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:

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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 try to 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:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

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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 creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own 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 of him 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 the depiction of character.

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English Language and Literature

• Admissions Requirements
• Fees and Funding
• Studying at Oxford

Course overview

UCAS code: Q300 Entrance requirements: AAA Course duration: 3 years (BA)

Subject requirements

Required subjects:  English Literature or English Language and Literature Recommended subjects: Not applicable Helpful subjects: A language, History

Other course requirements

Admissions tests: None Written Work: One piece

Admissions statistics*

Interviewed: 66% Successful: 23% Intake: 220 *3-year average 2021-23

Tel: +44 (0) 1865 271055 Email:  [email protected]

Unistats information for this course can be found at the bottom of the page

Please note that there may be no data available if the number of course participants is very small.

About the course

The English Language and Literature course at Oxford is one of the broadest in the country, giving you the chance to study writing in English from its origins in Anglo-Saxon England to the present.

As well as British literature, you can study works written in English from other parts of the world, and some originally written in other languages, allowing you to think about literature in English in multilingual and global contexts across time.

The course allows you a considerable degree of choice, both in developing your personal interests across core papers, and in choosing a topic for your dissertation and for a special option in your final year.

Options have included:

• Literature and revolution
• Postcolonial literature
• Writing lives
• Film criticism.

Studying literature at Oxford involves the development of sophisticated reading skills and of an ability to place literary texts in their wider intellectual and historical contexts. It also requires you to:

• consider the critical processes by which you analyse and judge
• learn about literary form and technique
• evaluate various approaches to literary criticism and theory
• study the development of the English language.

The Oxford English Faculty is the largest English department in Britain. Students are taught in tutorials by an active scholar in their field, many of whom also give lectures to all students in the English Faculty. You will therefore have the opportunity to learn from a wide range of specialist teachers.

Library provision for English at Oxford is exceptionally good. All students have access to the Bodleian Library (with its extensive manuscript collection), the English Faculty Library, their own college libraries and a wide range of electronic resources.

In your first year, you will be introduced to the conceptual and technical tools used in the study of language and literature, and to a wide range of different critical approaches. At the same time, you will be doing tutorial work on early medieval literature, Victorian literature and literature from 1910 to the present.

In your second and third years, you will extend your study of English literary history in four more period papers ranging from late medieval literature to Romanticism. These papers are assessed by three-hour written examinations at the end of your third year. You will also produce:

• a portfolio of three essays on Shakespeare, on topics of your choice
• an extended essay (or occasionally an examination) relating to a special options paper, chosen from a list of around 25 courses
• and an 8,000-word dissertation on a subject of your choice.

Submitted work will constitute almost half of the final assessment for most students.

Alternatively, in the second and third years, you can choose to follow our specialist course in Medieval Literature and Language, with papers covering literature in English from 650-1550 along with the history of the English language up to 1800, with a further paper either on Shakespeare or on manuscript and print culture. Students on this course also take a special options paper and submit a dissertation on a topic of their choice.

Astrophoria Foundation Year

If you’re interested in studying English but your personal or educational circumstances have meant you are unlikely to achieve the grades typically required for Oxford courses, then choosing to apply for English with a Foundation Year might be the course for you.

Visit our Foundation Year course pages for more details. 

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Please select 'see course data' to view the full Unistats data for English Language and Literature.

Visit the Studying at Oxford section of this page for a more general insight into what studying here is likely to be like. 

A typical week

Although details of practice vary from college to college, most students will have one or two tutorials (usually two students and a tutor) and one or two classes (in groups of around 8 to 10) each week. A tutorial usually involves discussion of an essay, which you will have produced based on your own reading and research that week. You will normally be expected to produce between eight and twelve pieces of written work each term. Most students will also attend several lectures each week.

Tutorials are usually 2-3 students and a tutor. Class sizes may vary depending on the options you choose. In college, there would usually be 6-12 students and in the department there would usually be no more than 15 students. There might be specific circumstances in which some classes contain around 20 students. 

Most tutorials, classes, and lectures are delivered by staff who are tutors in their subject. Many are world-leading experts with years of experience in teaching and research. Some teaching may also be delivered by postgraduate students who are usually studying at doctoral level.

To find out more about how our teaching year is structured, visit our  Academic Year  page.

Course structure

The content and format of this course may change in some circumstances. Read further information about potential course changes .

Academic Requirements

Wherever possible, your grades are considered in the context in which they have been achieved.

Read further information on  how we use contextual data .

Subject requirements 

If a practical component forms part of any of your science A‐levels used to meet your offer, we expect you to pass it.

If English is not your first language you may also need to meet our English language requirements .

Please note that creative writing qualifications, regardless of awarding body, are not accepted and will not help you meet the academic requirements for this course.

If your personal or educational circumstances have meant you are unlikely to achieve the grades listed above for undergraduate study, but you still have a strong interest in the subject, then applying for English with a Foundation Year might be right for you.

Visit the  Foundation Year course pages for more details of academic requirements and eligibility.

All candidates must follow the application procedure as shown on our  Applying to Oxford  pages.

The following information gives specific details for students applying for this course.

Admissions test

You do not need to take a written test as part of an application for this course. 

Written work

Visit our  written work page  for general guidance and to download the cover sheet.

What are tutors looking for?

Successful candidates will give evidence of wide, engaged, and thoughtful reading.

Written work helps us to gauge your analytical skills and your writing.

Interviews allow us to explore your enthusiasm for literature, your response to new ideas and information and your capacity for independent thought. We are not looking for any particular reading, or particular answers: we are interested in your ideas and in how you engage with literature.

Shortlisted candidates may also be asked to discuss an unseen piece of prose or verse given to you before or in the interview. Tutors appreciate that you may be nervous, and will try to put you at ease.

Visit the English website for more detail on the selection criteria for this course.

Our students go on to succeed in a very wide range of careers: the analytical and communication skills that develop during this course equip them for many different paths.

Popular careers and fields include:

• advertising
• librarianship
• public relations
• further research
• management consultancy

The Telling Our Stories Better project ran throughout 2021, bringing together alumni and current students of the English Faculty to talk about their time at Oxford and their career paths. Led by Dr Sophie Ratcliffe and Dr Ushashi Dasgupta , and managed by Dr Dominique Gracia, Stories aims to challenge misconceptions about who studies English and the career paths they take.

We don't want anyone who has the academic ability to get a place to study here to be held back by their financial circumstances. To meet that aim, Oxford offers one of the most generous financial support packages available for UK students and this may be supplemented by support from your college.

Please note that for full-time Home undergraduate students, current university policy is to charge fees at the level of the cap set by the government. The cap is currently set at £9,250 in 2024/25 and this has been included below as the guide annual course fee for courses starting in 2025. However, this page will be updated once the government has confirmed course fee information for full-time Home undergraduates starting courses in 2025. For details of annual increases, please see our guidance on likely increases to fees and charges .

Further details about fee status eligibility can be found on the fee status webpage.

For more information please refer to our  course fees page . Fees will usually increase annually. For details, please see our  guidance on likely increases to fees and charges.

Living costs

Living costs at Oxford might be less than you’d expect, as our  world-class resources  and  college provision  can help keep costs down.

Living costs for the academic year starting in 2025 are estimated to be between £1,425 and £2,035 for each month you are in Oxford. Our academic year is made up of three eight-week terms, so you would not usually need to be in Oxford for much more than six months of the year but may wish to budget over a nine-month period to ensure you also have sufficient funds during the holidays to meet essential costs. For further details please visit our  living costs webpage .

• Financial support

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Additional Fees and Charges Information for English Language and Literature

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Contextual information

Unistats course data from Discover Uni provides applicants with statistics about a particular undergraduate course at Oxford. For a more holistic insight into what studying your chosen course here is likely to be like, we would encourage you to view the information below as well as to explore our website more widely.

The Oxford tutorial

College tutorials are central to teaching at Oxford. Typically, they take place in your college and are led by your academic tutor(s) who teach as well as do their own research. Students will also receive teaching in a variety of other ways, depending on the course. This will include lectures and classes, and may include laboratory work and fieldwork. However, tutorials offer a level of personalised attention from academic experts unavailable at most universities.

During tutorials (normally lasting an hour), college subject tutors will give you and one or two tutorial partners feedback on prepared work and cover a topic in depth. The other student(s) in your tutorials will be doing the same course as you. Such regular and rigorous academic discussion develops and facilitates learning in a way that isn’t possible through lectures alone. Tutorials also allow for close progress monitoring so tutors can quickly provide additional support if necessary.

Read more about tutorials and an Oxford education

College life

Our colleges are at the heart of Oxford’s reputation as one of the best universities in the world.

• At Oxford, everyone is a member of a college as well as their subject department(s) and the University. Students therefore have both the benefits of belonging to a large, renowned institution and to a small and friendly academic community. Each college or hall is made up of academic and support staff, and students. Colleges provide a safe, supportive environment leaving you free to focus on your studies, enjoy time with friends and make the most of the huge variety of opportunities.
• Porters’ lodge (a staffed entrance and reception)
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• Student accommodation
• Tutors’ teaching rooms
• Chapel and/or music rooms
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• Common room (known as the JCR).
• All first-year students are offered college accommodation either on the main site of their college or in a nearby college annexe. This means that your neighbours will also be ‘freshers’ and new to life at Oxford. This accommodation is guaranteed, so you don’t need to worry about finding somewhere to live after accepting a place here, all of this is organised for you before you arrive.
• All colleges offer at least one further year of accommodation and some offer it for the entire duration of your degree. You may choose to take up the option to live in your college for the whole of your time at Oxford, or you might decide to arrange your own accommodation after your first year – perhaps because you want to live with friends from other colleges.
• While college academic tutors primarily support your academic development, you can also ask their advice on other things. Lots of other college staff including welfare officers help students settle in and are available to offer guidance on practical or health matters. Current students also actively support students in earlier years, sometimes as part of a college ‘family’ or as peer supporters trained by the University’s Counselling Service.

Read more about Oxford colleges and how you choose

FIND OUT MORE

• Visit the faculty's website

Our 2024 undergraduate open days will be held on 26 and 27 June and 20 September.

Register to find out more about our upcoming open days.

English Faculty State School Open Day  - 9 March 2024

RELATED PAGES

• Which Oxford colleges offer my course?
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Related courses

• English and Modern Languages
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• History and English
• Classics and English

Feel inspired?

Why not have a look at the University's collection of literary resources on our  Great Writers Inspire site .

You may also like to listen to radio programs such as BBC Radio 4's In Our Time , or one of the University's podcast series .

Alternatively magazines like The New Yorker , or journals like London Review of Books and The Paris Review , contain lots of fascinating long-read articles and essays. 

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Essay Guide

Our comprehensive guide to the stages of the essay development process. Back to Student Resources

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Writing essays

• Essay writing
• Being a writer
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• Speaking vs. Writing
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Welcome to Writing Essays, the RLF’s online guide to everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about writing undergraduate essays.

The guide is a toolbox of essay writing skills and resources that you can choose from to suit your particular needs. It combines descriptive and practical elements. That is, it tells you what things mean and what they are; and it uses examples to show you how they work.

Writing Essays takes you through the whole essay writing process – from preparing and planning to completion. Writing essays is structured progressively and I recommend that you use it in this way. However, you will see from the sidebar that the guide is divided into a number of main sections. Click on any one of these and you will see that it’s divided into shorter sections or subsections. So you can either read it straight through from start to finish or you can go straight to the area that’s most relevant to you.

Writing Essays does not cover every type of writing you will do at university but it does cover the principal types. So you will find guides to essay writing, dissertation writing, and report writing. You will also find a section dealing with the differences between writing for the humanities and writing for the sciences and social sciences. The information and guidelines in these sections will provide blueprints you can apply elsewhere.

You will see in the topbar options above that there is also a glossary of terms used in this guide; and a list of suggested further reading and online resources.

It is important to say here what Writing Essays does not do. It does not offer detailed advice on general study skills although it does cover some aspects of reading for writing and how to write a literature review. Unlike some guides, this one does not have anything to say about using computers except: use them, and save your work often.

Writing Essays does not deal with grammar and punctuation. This does not mean that I think that these things are not important, or that you don’t need to pay attention to them – all writers do. However, my experience of working with students has taught me two things. First, that the most common difficulties in writing essays are to do with areas like understanding the question and making a logical structure. Second, that when these difficulties are fixed, problems with grammar and punctuation are easier to see and fix.

Don’t just use Writing Essays once. Make it your constant reference point for writing essays. Make it the emergency number you dial if you breakdown or can’t get started!

English and Comparative Literary Studies

How to write an essay.

This handbook is a guide that I’m hoping will enable you. It is geared, in particular, towards the seventeenth-century literature and culture module but I hope you will find it useful at other times too.

I would like to stress, though, that it is not the only way to do things. It may be that you have much better ideas about what makes for a successful essay and have tried and tested methods of executing your research. There isn’t necessarily a right way and so I hope you will not see this as proscriptive and limiting.

You should talk to all your tutors about what makes for a good essay to get a sense of the different ways that you might construct an essay.

1. Essay writing (p.2)

2. Close reading (p. 4)

3. Research (p. 6)

4. Constructing an argument (p. 8)

5. Help with this particular assessment (p. 9)

6. Grade descriptions (p. 10)

1. ESSAY WRITING (and historicist writing in particular)

Essay writing has four stages: reading, planning, writing and proof-reading. Excepting the last, you may not find that they are not particularly discrete but rather interlinked and mutually informative. If any stage is skipped or done badly, though, it will impair your work.

1) Read the text and make sure you understand it. Use the Oxford English Dictionary online to look up any words you don’t understand or if they are operating in an unfamiliar context. Available on the Warwick web: http://www.oed.com

2) Do a close reading. Make a list technical features (cf. the page in this booklet entitled ‘close reading’; refer to the section on poetic form in the back of your Norton Anthologies pp. 2944-52). Ask yourself: ‘how does the text achieve its effects?’ Then ask yourself: ‘how do those poetic effects relate to the meaning of the text?’.

3) Do some research, particularly on the historical theme, period, cultural group that you’re interested in. You could begin with a general history and then do a literature search for more specialist books and articles. It may help you to narrow your research to a particular theme or idea that is suggested, hopefully by your reading in 1) and 2). Rather than trying to find out about the whole of seventeenth-century culture, limit your research to the restoration, cavalier culture, medicine, the family or whatever. (See the handout on research).

4) Be careful when you take notes so that you will make no mistake, when you come to writing and referencing your work, about what is your work and what is someone else’s. Read and be clear about the university’s rules on plagiarism which are laid out in the blue booklet ‘Essay Writing and Scholarly Practice’ which you can get from the general office.

B) Planning

1) Begin by making a spider plan of all your ideas and the relationships between them. IF YOU DON'T LIKE SPIDERS FORGET THIS BIT.

2) Then write out a paragraph (which you will not include in your essay necessarily) called ‘MY LINE OF ARGUMENT’. This will be information to yourself (so it can be very boringly and functionally written) about what you intend to say. Ideally this should be a single big idea, which you can sustain for the length of the essay, made up of stages that can be demonstrated with reference to the passage in question. It may well be that you want to write something similar to this ‘line of argument’ paragraph, only in a more dynamic and elegant way, for your introduction. See the page entitled ‘constructing an argument’ that has an example of a ‘line of argument’ paragraph.

3) Then write out a linear plan of your essay with a logical ARGUMENT, an argument that is assertively stated and then proved through the course of your piece. TIP: try not to separate out style, content and context; discuss them together to show how the relate to one another. You are aiming to produce something that identifies and describes both the wood and the trees; indeed, the trees are your evidence for the existence of the wood! You need to put together a big argument out of lots of bits of evidence.

1) Everyone has his or her own way of writing. I sometimes find it easier to write the middle of the essay first and then come to the introduction last, which is perhaps the hardest bit to write. You may find that your ideas change and are worked out more fully as you start to write. In which case go back to B) and produce another plan. Present your ideas as a finished thought, rather than a thought process.

2) Keep yourself closely to your argument by imagining your reader. Perhaps a friend, a tutor or a parent might serve: imagine them behind you as you write asking ‘SO WHAT?’, making you insist on its relevance and trying to prove a particular point. Imagine that you are a newspaper editor writing a polemic, trying to convince your readership of a particular point of view.

3) Inventing a title and writing an introduction. You should try to make your essay interesting to an examiner. Which do you think is the best of these three titles: ‘Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’; ‘Discuss the question of race in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’; ‘The “gallant slave”: the idea of the noble savage in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’. Similarly with the introduction. The first sentence should grab the examiner immediately. Which is a better first sentence: ‘Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko was published in 1688 and is a prose work about Surinam’; ‘At the heart of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko stands the deep paradox of the ‘royal slave’.

4) Using secondary literary criticism. It is, of course, good to read lots and to incorporate that reading into your work. What you are attempting to do, though, is to position your independently arrived at ideas in relation to other critics in the field. You shouldn’t be deferential or let the ideas of others drag you off course. You should USE other people’s work in the service of your own argument. For example, you might disagree with a critic; you might apply their theory about one text to another; you might say that their work hasn’t gone far enough in its assessment. Never use a quotation from someone else to clinch an argument: just because someone famous has said x or y it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily true. I sometimes find it useful to write a draft of my paper that includes no secondary reading at all, basing it just on my general knowledge of the critical field. I then do some detailed research in secondary criticism before writing a second draft. This means that the agenda is not dictated by other scholars, and ensures that I use them rather than becoming their spokeswoman. Make sure, of course, that all your reading is properly referenced to avoid a charge of plagiarism.

D) Proof-reading

1) Check the spelling: in particular the names of the author and the text that you’re looking at MUST be spelled correctly.

2) Check your punctuation. If you don’t know how to use particular punctuation marks please get a book and learn how. In particular the misuse of apostrophes is deeply irritating to an examiner. The Collins gem guides are really good also Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves is fun and informative.

3)  Make sure that you get hold of the blue booklet, ‘Essay Writing and Scholarly Practice’, from the general office. You must use the reference guide in there. I favor the MHRA guidelines; you may prefer the MLA style. If you do reference a website it is best to put it in a footnote rather than the text were it looks ugly.

2. CLOSE READING

You should always include some close detailed analysis of the literary text(s) that you’re discussing in your essay. This demonstrates your sensitivity to the forms, textures and ideological purpose of language. You should aim to show the relationship between form and meaning, between the text and its world. Before you can put together an argument about the relationship between a text and its time you will need to do some close reading, compiling a list of technical features in a text or an excerpt from a text. Choose excerpts that relate to themes or passages that interest you. Then you can develop a checklist of features to look for. Use this as a guide but you may want to add to, or amend it.

*** What you see will be very different from what other people see. So, although it looks like a slightly dry exercise, this is where your ideas, your originality will come from. Close reading, in any module, will make your essays sparkle. ***

Big questions:

 Prose, drama or poetry?

 Genre? (e.g. is it panegyric, epic, restoration comedy or what ever)

 Does it remind you of anything? Can you compare or contrast it with something of a similar date? Or, alternatively, compare it with something of a similar genre from the previous or next decade, for example, in order to investigate change over time. 

Smaller questions:

 Poetry: metre, rhythm and rhyme. Look at the section on poetic form at the back of the Norton Anthology (p. 2944) and other guides. Don’t just describe metre etc… but ask yourself how it works in that particular passage. How are units of meaning created by the line divisions? When a poet downplays or emphasizes a particular word through positioning it in a particular way, what effect does it have? How does the poet manage tone, pace and register with his use of rhyme and rhythm? iF THESE FEATURES ARE NOT IMPORTANT IN YOUR PIECE IGNORE THEM.

 Drama: look at the length / speed of the speeches, the stage directions, the entrances and exits.

 Prose: rhetorical features and clause structure are the things to look out for in particular. Are the sentences complex or simple? Is it in hypotaxis or parataxis? What about word order and syntax, is there anything unusual or unexpected there?

 What is the overall structure of the passage / text? Are there abrupt changes or a progression from one idea to another?

 What other structures are there? Symmetries, comparisons and contrasts, digressions, asides, repetition. Is there any dialogue? Are the arguments circular or progressive?

 Are there any words you don’t fully understand? If you aren’t in a closed exam you could look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary online. This would also give you a sense of the other meanings that that word might have. Are there any puns?

 Think about grammatical features: tenses, conditional constructions, the passive voice. Is the passage in the first, second or third person? Perhaps there are tense or person shifts; what effect do these produce?

 Look out for predominance: several superlatives or comparative adjectives and adverbs; a lot of words that mean a similar thing, repetitions of possessive pronouns or what ever.

 What kind of language is being used? i.e. what register is it in? Is it elevated or earthy, legal or lyrical, rhetorical or religious? Why?

 Look for particular rhetorical features: metaphor and simile, hyperbole and litotes, personification, metonymy and so on.

 Look at punctuation (but be careful: it could be the intervention of a printer or a later editor). Look out for: enjambment, parentheses, direct speech? When the punctuation is sparse, why? Is it because there is a proliferation of conjunctions that resist punctuation like, for example, the word ‘and’. This may indicate parataxis or a very conversational style.

 Look out for allusions and references, often to the bible or classical stories. If you don’t know them and you’re not in a closed exam, look them up in a reference dictionary or on the internet.

 What is the tone of the passage? Is it homiletic, comic, anxious, melancholy or ironic? How is this effect created?

 Where else does that poet use similar phrases, ideas, patterns and images? What does it say about his or her concerns and art?

TIP: Don’t make simple associations between sense and sound. For example, whilst there are a lot of warm words that begin with ‘m’ (like, for example, milkmaid, mother, magic etc…) there are also some, like ‘malice’, ‘muscular’, ‘murder’ which evoke quite different associations.

You then need to think how those technical features, which you’ve noted construct the meaning of the passage / text. Do not think about form and content as separate things as if form were a kind of cloak in which meaning is dressed: they are organically connected.

Above and beyond that you will also need to think about how that text (both its form and its meaning) relate to the particular concerns and fashions (literary, political, philosophical etc…) of its time. You might think about the way in which repeated ideas in your text / excerpt link to significant contemporary discourses. Look for substituted vocabularies: i.e. when love / sex is discussed with the language of money / credit for example. Could that be related to prevailing economic trends and ideas?

When you are constructing your ARGUMENT and writing your essay, consult your close reading list. Not everything there will be relevant to your ARGUMENT; you only want to include the things that relate, that offer evidence for a particular point of view about how the text is placed culturally, politically, socially and / or historically.

3. RESEARCH

Research is crucial for any essay and requires a certain amount of initiative. You will partly have to learn by trial and error. Here are a few tips and ideas, though. Read both narrowly (and address the theme of your essay) and also widely. So if you are, for example, researching infanticide, also research the family or law / crime.

When you research a context it might be worth look at the work of philosophers, painters, and theologians and see what they were saying / doing in this period. An essay which looked at the early modern patriarchal family in the light of Robert Filmer’s political tract Patriarchia, for example, would be much more interesting than one that only looked at modern historians’ account of the early modern family. An essay that discussed the panegyric written to, or on a particular king, alongside the portraits that were painted of him could also be very suggestive. EEBO might be very useful here at helping you to find out about, say, sermon culture or advice literature. (look at the last page of this booklet for some help here).

Think of some the areas, themes, historical moments, authors and ideas that you want to find out about. List them as key words. For example: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, race, royalism, restoration, early modern, colonialism, slavery etc… Do not be limited here. Think of terms / phrases that will give you some background too. How about ‘cheap print’, ‘renaissance politics’ etc…

Then begin on the computer. Be careful of stuff that you find on the ordinary WWW. It is not usually very reliable. Often this is stuff that people can’t publish in proper books. Use it is a guide and be very critical.

1) http://www.jstor.org (through the Warwick network only). Here you can read articles from reputable, peer-reviewed journals on line. An excellent starting point. Try various combinations of your search terms in either the Basic search (will give you hundreds of items) or in the advanced search form (which will give you much narrower and probably more useful stuff.

Try it out; go to the advanced search form:

A) In the box marked ‘All of these words’ insert the word ‘Behn’. Then tick the box marked ‘title’ and then also the box marked ‘article’.  Press the ‘Search’ button. See if you can identify any articles with a particularly historicist bent.

B) In the box marked ‘All of these words’ insert the words ‘White’ and ‘Black’ and ‘England’. In the box marked ‘exact phrase’ enter ‘Seventeenth-century’. Press search and see what you get out. Try other, similar search terms.

C) In the box marked ‘All of these words’ insert the word ‘Royalist’. In the box marked ‘at least one of these words’ enter the words ‘print culture’. Perhaps limit to articles by checking the relevant tick box. Press search and see if any of those are useful. [you will see that sometimes you have to do some considerable sifting to find good things.]

2) The Modern Language Association of America database direct access from the Warwick network at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/electronicresources/databases/#m

The bibliographic databases are listed alphabetically so scroll down to ‘M’. Select ‘MLA’. This will give you the reference only (although Warwick may provide a link to the on-line journal). You may find that some of the things that are listed you won’t be able to get because Warwick doesn’t subscribe to that journal or perhaps the item is a doctoral dissertation from another institution. Don’t worry, you’re not expected to read everything under the sun. Leave those things that you can’t get.

Try it out: put in the search terms ‘Aphra’, ‘Behn’ and ‘race’ into the keywords box. Press search and see what you get.

3) Historical abstracts: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/arts/elecresources/#databases_internet

Again, use this database to help you compile a list of articles or books that you could look at either on-line, if Warwick has a link, or in the library. Ignore the things that you can’t get hold of.

Try it out:

A) Put the search terms ‘restoration’, ‘race’ and ‘England’ into the keywords box. Press search.

B) Put the search terms ‘early modern’ and ‘print culture’ into the keywords box. Press search. Again you will have to decide what’s useful / relevant.

4) Use the library catalogue, don’t limit yourself to books about English. Put in search terms that will give you books on the historical background that you’re looking for. Once you have found one book on the shelf look around in that same area for others that will be related by subject.

5) Look on your reading list for general background books.

 CONSTRUCTING AN ARGUMENT

Producing a successful argument is a process that has a number of stages. Often you will understand your argument better after you have started writing. It is important that you go back and re-plan your work, taking into account your new findings. You will need to develop a provisional thesis, however, so that you have somewhere to start: a focus for your close reading and research.

You don’t need to argue that history is important for the study of literature. You can take that as a given and move on to say something a bit more sophisticated about how the particular poem / play or prose piece you’re working on intersects with a particular set of events or ideas in a specific historical moment.

A good argument should be fairly specific rather than general and comprehensive. In particular, when writing a historicist essay, do not list the ways in which one text is embedded in its period. Instead choose one of those ways and research it in more depth. So, rather than writing about, say, Ben Jonson’s interest in Anabaptists, Spanishness, alchemy, the plague, etc… in The Alchemist, choose one of these themes and find out about it in the historiography of the seventeenth century and couple this research with a close reading of those sections of the play that treat that theme.

Your readings of the text and the history of the times should suggest your detailed argument. Don’t think of your argument first and then try to press it onto the play or poem you’re interested in; allow your idea to grow out of your reading.

Below is my best attempt at a LINE OF ARGUMENT for an essay on Rochester and Milton. Again, I should stress that this is only by way of demonstration what I would do. This is very different from what you would do. There is no one way and your ideas will be as interesting / valid as mine. Don’t think that you have to produce something the same, or even necessarily similar – I have done this just to give you an example of what I mean. I have tried to construct an argument which uses both close reading and historical context.

Imagining the future in the restoration: a critical comparison of the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and John Milton.

Line of Argument:

This essay will argue that Rochester’s poetry is not only everywhere fascinated by time, regularly exploring what it is and how it operates, but that this interest betrays his sophisticated engagement with contemporary political philosophy. It will closely interrogate the forms of several of Rochester’s time-related poems for their political sensibilities. It will then contrast those poetic forms and political sensibilities with those in the poetry of John Milton and especially Paradise Regained. Milton – as I shall show with the use of historical evidence – is very differently socially and politically placed, indeed at the other end of the ideological spectrum from the Earl of Rochester. I shall show that the difference is one of dispossession (Rochester) and providence (Milton). Rochester’s narrators exist in fear of, and subject to an arbitrary and absolute future; Milton’s Paradise Regained, on the other hand, asks an imagined republican reader to wait in anticipation of a future in which God will deliver their political success. I shall explore the way in which Rochester’s pessimism – the idea and tone of dispossession in his poetry – and Milton’s optimism – the visionary quality of his providential allegory – stand in contrast to the respective fortunes of the political groups to which those poets actually belonged and at the particular times when the poems I’m discussing here were written and published: i.e. Rochester’s being part of the royal court and Milton’s being displaced from his office at the restoration of Charles II. This will arrive at, by way of conclusion, the demonstrable sadness of some of Rochester’s verse which indicates the complex circumspection with which he viewed his own aristocratic, political community and its limited expectations of monarchical authority.

HELP FOR THIS PARTICULAR ASSESSMENT

Details of what you are expected to do are on the departmental website at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/undergrad/modules/second/en228/assessedessay2/

There you will find a list of texts and details of how to find them on EEBO (Early English Books Online). Their website is at: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home

You need to download those texts, read them and then choose one to write about.

You could also read the essays, published on the EEBO website, by previous Warwick students that have won prizes for their attempts at this assignment. http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/edu/edu_win_03.html

You might also use EEBO in your essay research. Try the subject list in particular. If you get yourself to the search form at http://eebo.chadwyck.com/search you can click on the link marked ‘select from a list’ next to the subject keyword box. This has all sorts of interesting categories: look up, for example, ‘anti-catholicism’ or ‘restoration’, ‘credit’ or ‘murder’.

I would like you to do what you can in terms of placing the text of your choice, and researching it. Then I’d like you to come and see me at the end of term with a title and a line of argument. You could also, if you wish, bring a longer essay plan.

This is Isabel talking to her group. We will all be available on email over the holidays--do ask. Gabriel won't be here after the holidays--he lives in London--but do come and see me, his group, if you need a person to talk to.

USING THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

The OED can be found online (through the Warwick network) at http://www.oed.com. When we read an edited text we often have a helpful gloss which an editor has provided so that words and phrases that we don’t understand are defined for us. In this assignment you will have to put together that gloss for yourself and the best way to start to do that is with the OED. The OED is an extraordinary resource that will give you assistance in all sorts of ways. For example:

a) it will obviously help you to understand words which you don’t understand or unusual applications. It will also help you to find obsolete and dialect words.

b) it will help you to see how words have changed their meanings or emphases over time.

c) it will help you to identify puns. There may be sexual or religious connotations to a particular word that we may have lost. Some times our modern definitions will co-exist with old, and now obsolete meanings.

d) it will tell you the earliest use of a particular word. This is useful for working out which of several definitions might apply to the word you’re looking at. Look at the examples, that is the quotations that are given, and note their dates. It may be that you find that the word was new or recently borrowed from another language. Click the ‘date chart’ button to see the uses represented on a time line. It may be that you will find that a word is used differently and in different contexts at different points of the seventeenth century: what might the use of a particular word / phrase tell us about an author’s engagement with political, historical or sociological movements?

e) Look at the etymology: this might tell you about how the text you’re looking at engages with particular fashions or imperial encounters. Look up, for example, ‘chocolate’ where does the word come from? At what period does it come into the language?

f) the examples given in the dictionary will also help you to see how other contemporaries used the word or phrase you’re interested in, and in what sort of contexts it came up. In this way it can operate as a concordance. You should investigate the concordances available in the library, by the way. Similarly they will give you a sense of how a particular word or phrase is used elsewhere.

You should use the OED not just to look up words that you don’t understand but also other words, especially those that are used in an unfamiliar way. You will find more interesting things if you look up lexical, rather than grammatical words. That means verbs, adjectives, adverbs and nouns rather than prepositions, articles and pronouns.

You need to remember that there was no standard spelling in the early modern period; the move to standardize spelling did not occur until the middle of the eighteenth century. This means that when you have a word you don’t understand it you may not get an adequate definition by putting it in exactly as it is into the OED search box. Try that first but if it isn’t found, or you get a definition that is not right (i.e. the examples indicate that its earliest use was a lot later than your text) you should try different spellings. In particular the vowels are often interchangeable. Try every vowel combination that you can think of. Try substituting ts and cs, us and vs and other related consonants.

Try out the OED. Look up the following words: how have their meanings have changed? Where do the words come from? How were the words used at different points in history? And in the seventeenth century in particular?

 Isabel Davis

English and Related Literature

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• Department of English and Related Literature
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Writing Resources

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The Department of English have developed a range of simple resources to help anyone improve the quality of their writing. The advice is intended not just to help with academic work but also fiction, journalism and all forms of prose.

The aim to support anyone with their writing whether they are at school, college or university or just looking to enhance their own writing.

Also included in this section is Ways of Reading a guide to getting the most from studying a text and  Writing about . . .   a series of short films by academics from the Department of English giving advice and insights into writing on a range of topics.

  The Basics: the Anatomy of a Good Essay  - How to structure an essay and develop a readable argument for academic work.  

Close reading - Advice on critically studying a text to get the most from your reading.

Constructing an Argument - How to express your ideas about a text and not just summarise the text in your assignment.

Using Criticism  - How to choose and make use of literary criticism in your assignments.

Our Writers on Writing: Tips & Tricks for Writing Well  - The department's staff offer their own simple pieces of wisdom for improving your writing.

  10 Stylish Suggestions for Well-crafted Prose  - A selection of simple pieces of advice for enhancing the readability of any piece of prose writing.

  How to Reference your Essays  - A short article on the importance of referencing and advice on the correct way to do it.

  Tempting Titles  - A good title can make a piece of work stand out and make the reader want to engage with the text.

  Writing Makeover Tips - Short pieces of advice to improve your writing so it is more direct, easier to read and has more impact.

  10 Things To Do Before You Submit Your Essay - A final checklist to make sure your work is submission ready. 

Ways of Reading

Ways of Reading a Novel - Advice on analysing a text and moving beyond just reading the story.

Ways of Reading a Play - Tips on the special skills needed for reading works designed to be performed.

Ways of Reading a Translation - How to critically read a text that is not in your native language.

Ways of Reading a Poem - Different approches to reading poetry that can open up the text.

Ways of Reading a Film - Practical advice on the additional skills required for studying films as texts.

Writing About. . .

Writing about Writing - In this film Dr Michael McCluskey introduces the 'Writing About...' series of films. A collection of short videos from academics at the Department of English and Related Literature on various topics.

Writing about Things - In this short film Professor Helen Smith talk about how texts present themselves physically or make themselves present to the reader.

Writing about Archives - In this short video Dr Trev Broughton talks about writing on official records, like minutes and wills or private papers such as letters, diaries and manuscript autobiographies.

Writing about Jane Austen  - In this brief film Dr Gillian Russell discusses writing about Jane Austen and her works.

Writing about Technology - In this short video Dr Nicoletta Asciuto talks about writing on technology within poetry and prose as part of your academic studies.

Writing about Nonsense - In this film Dr James Williams discusses approaches to nonsense writing as part of studying English Literature.  

Writing about Art - In this short video Dr Alexandra Kingston-Reese discusses how writing about literature can often mean writing about images as well.

Writing about Dickens - In this short film Professor John Bowen the talks about ways of writing about Charles Dickens as a part of an academic course.

  Writing about Comedy - In this short film Dr Bryan Radley discusses writing about comedy.

Writing about Muslims - In this short film Dr Claire Chambers talks about writing about works by Muslims in the UK and approaches to them as a part of an academic course.

Writing about Homer - In this short film Dr Jane Raisch discusses approaches to writing about Homer.

Writing about The Bible - Professor Kevin Killeen talks about ways of writing about the Old and New Testament as a part of an academic course on English Literature.

Writing about Dante - Dr Kenneth Clarke talks about studying and writing about Dante as a part of an English or English Literature course.

Writing about Vikings - In this video Dr Matthew Townend discusses writing about Old Norse poetry and sagas.

Writing about Zadie Smith - In this short film Dr Alexandra Kingston-Reese talks about writing on the subject of contemporary novelist and literary critic Zadie Smith.

Writing about the Gothic - In this short film Dr Deborah Russell discusses writing about gothic literature.

Department of English and Related Literature University of York , York , YO10 5DD , UK Tel: work +44 (0) 1904 323366 | [email protected]

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How to Write an English Literature Essay?

In A-Level , GCSE by Think Student Editor August 26, 2022 Leave a Comment

Writing an English literature essay can be very stressful, especially if you have never had to write an essay for this subject before. The many steps and parts can be hard to understand, making the whole process feel overwhelming before you even start. As an English literature student, I have written many essays before, and remember how hard it felt at the start. However, I can assure you that this gets far easier with practice, and it even becomes fun! In this article, I will give you tips and tricks to write the best essay you can. As well as a simple step-by-step guide to writing one that will simplify the process.

Writing an English literature essay has 3 main parts: planning, writing and editing. Planning is the most important, as it allows you to clearly structure your essay so that it makes logical sense. After you have planned, write the essay, including an introduction, 3-4 main points/paragraphs, and a conclusion. Then check through the spelling and grammar of your essay to ensure it is readable and has hit all of your assessment objectives.

While this short explanation of the process should have given you an idea of how to write your essay, for key tips and tricks specific to English literature please read on!

Table of Contents

How to plan an English literature essay?

The most important thing in any English essay is the structure. The best way to get a logical and clear structure which flows throughout the essay is to plan before you start . A plan should include your thesis statement, 3-4 main paragraph points, key context and quotes to relate to.

A common way of structuring a plan is in the TIPE method. This involves planning each of your main points and sections on a few lines, in the structure of the main essay, making it easy to write out. Always highlight the key word in the question before you start planning, then also annotate any given extracts for ideas. If you have an extract, the main focus of your essay should be on that.

Planning should take around 10-15 minutes of your exam time for essay questions. This sounds like a lot, but it saves you time later on in writing, making it well worth the effort at the start of an exam.

Start each plan with a mind map of your key moments, quotes, context and ideas about the exam question theme, character, or statement. This helps you get all of your ideas down and figure out which are best. It also creates a bank to come back to later if you have extra time and want to write more.

Once you have created your mind map, find a thesis statement related to the question that you have 3-4 main points to support. It can be tempting to write lots of points, but remember, quality is always better than quantity in English Literature essays.

A useful method to help you plan is by creating a TIPE plan. With the following bullet points, you can now begin your own TIPE plan.

• Introduction
• Points – you should have 3-4 key paragraphs in your essay, including relevant quotes with analysis (and techniques the author is using) and context for each point
• Ending – conclusion

How to write an English literature essay introduction?

Depending on what level of literature essay you are writing, you will need different parts and depths of content . However, one thing that stays fairly consistent is the introduction. Introductions should hook the reader , literally “introducing” them to your essay and writing style, while also keeping them interested in reading on.

Some people find it difficult to write introductions, often because they have not already got into the feeling of the essay. For this, leaving space at the top of the page to write the introduction after you finish the rest of the essay is a great way to ensure your introduction is top quality. Writing essays out of order is ok, as long as you can still make them flow in a logical way.

The first line of any introduction should provide the focus for the whole essay. This is called a thesis statement and defines to the examiner exactly what you will “prove” throughout your essay, using quotes and other evidence. This thesis statement should always include the focus word from the question, linked to the view you will be arguing.

For example, “Throughout Macbeth, Power is presented by Shakespeare as a dangerously addictive quality.” This statement includes the play (or book/poem) title, the theme (or other element, such as the name of a character) stated in the question, and the focus (addiction to power). These qualities clearly show the examiner what to expect, as well as helping you structure your essay.

The rest of the introduction should include a brief note on some context related to the theme or character in question, as well as a very brief summary of your main paragraph points, of which there should be 3-4. This is unique to each essay and text and should be brief points that you elaborate on later.

How to structure an English literature essay?

As already discussed, the plan is the most important part of writing an English literature essay. However, once you start writing, the structure of your essay is key to a succinct and successful argument.

All essays should have an introduction with a thesis statement, 3-4 main points, and a conclusion.

The main part of your essay, and the most important, is the 3-4 main points you use to support your thesis. These should each form one paragraph, with an opening and a conclusion, almost like a mini essay within the main one. These paragraphs can be hard to structure, so many students choose to use the PETAL method.

PETAL paragraphs involve all of the key elements you need to get top marks in any English literature essay: Point, Evidence, Techniques, Analysis and Link.

The point should be the opening of the paragraph, stating what you are looking at within that section, related to your thesis, for example, “Shakespeare uses metaphors to show how the pursuit of power makes Macbeth obsessive and tyrannical”. Then, use a key moment in the play to illustrate the point, with a quote.

Choosing quotes is hard, but remember, quotes that are short and directly related to your thesis are best. Once you have chosen a quote, analyse it in relation to your point, then link to the question. You should also include some context and, at A-Level, different viewpoints or critics.

After these points, you should always include a conclusion. Restate your thesis, introduction and each point, but do not introduce new ideas. Explain and link these points by summarising them, then give your overall idea on the question.

If you have time, including a final sentence about wider social impacts or an overarching moral from the book is a good way to show a deep and relevant understanding of the text, impressing the examiner.

How to write an English literature essay for GCSE?

Marking for GCSE English Literature essays is done based on 4 assessment objectives. These are outlined in the table below. These are the same across all exam boards.

If you follow the structure outlined above, you should easily hit all of these AOs. The first two are the most important, and carry the most points in exams, however the others are what will bring your grade up to the best you can, so remember to include them too.

Context, or AO3, should be used whenever it is relevant to your argument. However, it is always better to include less context points on this than to try and add random bits everywhere, as this will break the flow of your essay, removing AO1 marks. For more information about the assessment objectives for GCSE English Literature, check out this governmental guide .

For more information on GCSEs, and whether you have to take English literature, please read this Think Student guide.

How do you write an English literature essay for A-Level?

Similarly, to GCSE, all A-Level papers are marked on a set of assessment objectives which are also set by Ofqual, so are the same for all exam boards. There are more than at GCSE, as A-Level essays must be in greater depth, and as such have more criteria to mark on. The table below shows the assessment objectives.

AO1 and AO2 are very similar to GCSE, however the writing needed to achieve top marks in them is much harder to reach. It must be very detailed and have a clear, distinct style to reach high marks. These skills are developed through practice, so writing lots of essays over your course will help you to gain the highest marks you can here.

AO3 and AO4 often go together, as literary and historical contexts. AO3 is again similar to GCSE, but in more depth. However, AO4 is new, and involves wider reading around your texts. Links to texts from the same author, time period, or genre make good comparisons, and you only need to make one or two to get the marks in this section.

AO5 is also one of the harder sections, which involves considering interpretations of the text that may not have been your first thought, and that you may not agree with. This can elevate your essay to much higher marks if you can achieve them.

One of the best ways to get AO5 marks is to look at critics of the book you are studying. These are academic views, and to remember quotes from them to put in when they are relevant. For more information about the assessment objectives for A-Level English Literature, check out this guide by AQA.

Which GCSE and A-Level English Literature papers have essay questions?

All GCSE and A-Level English Literature papers will have at least one essay question. Essay questions are usually the longest answers in the paper. However, sometimes other questions may require an essay style format but shorter. The exact structure of the exam paper and where essay questions are will depend on which exam board your GCSE or A-Level qualification is with .

GCSE English Literature paper 1 usually requires 2 essays . Each question in this paper is an essay, and each has an extract to be based around, so focussing your analysis on that extract is the easiest way to get marks.

The marks for these essays vary depending on exam board . However, as they are assessed on the objectives above, you don’t need to think too much about the marks, as it does not work in the same way as other subjects with a mark per point made. Instead, essays are marked cumulatively based on the general level of discussion achieved.

GCSE English Literature paper 2 usually requires 3 essays , one in each section. Sections A and B are an essay each, without an extract, then section C involves a shorter essay on unseen poetry and a short answer question. This type of question is harder, as you have to really know the book you are studying in order to get a good mark and include enough quotes.

A-Level English Literature is based entirely on essay questions. The questions are based on poetry, novels and plays, some seen and some unseen. About half of the essays have an accompanying extract, however you are expected to have very good knowledge of your texts even for extract questions, so do not rely on extracts for quotes and marks.

The information above is mainly based of the AQA exam papers, which you can find the specifications to for GCSE and A-Level by clicking here and here respectively. While this is mainly based of AQA, the exam boards all have rather similar structures and so you will still be able to use this information to get a rough idea.

Top tips for writing the best essay you can in English literature

This section will provide you with some tips to help you with your English literature essay writing. I recommend you also check out this Think Student article on how to revise for English literature. Now without further hesitation, lets jump into them.

Focus on the structure of your English literature essay

A logical and clear structure is key to allowing your essay to stand out to an examiner. They read hundreds of essays, so a good structure will let your creative analysis shine in a way that makes sense and is clear, as well as not confusing them.

The arguments you make in the essay should be coherent, directly linked to the question, and to each other. The easiest way to do this is to ensure you properly plan before you start writing , and to use the acronyms above to make the process as easy as possible in the exam.

Always use examples and quotes in your English literature essay

For every paragraph you need to have at least 1, if not more quotes and references to sections of the text . Ensure that every example you use is directly relevant to your point and to the question. For example, if you have a question about a character in the play, you should use quotes from or about them, rather than quotes about other things.

These quotes should always be analysed in detail, however, so do not use more than you can really look at within the time limit. Always aim for quality over quantity.

Leave time to edit and re-read your English literature essay

After you are finished writing, go back and re-read your essay from start to finish as many times as you can within the exam time limit. Focus first on grammar and spelling mistakes, then on general flow and coherency. If you notice that you have gone off topic, remove the sentence if you can, or edit it to be relevant.

Remember, the most important thing in the exam is that your text makes sense to the reader , so use concise, subject specific terminology, but not unnecessarily. You do not need to memorise big technical words to get good marks, as long as you can say what you mean.

Read other people’s English literature essays

One of the least understood tips for getting good marks at GCSE, A-Level and beyond is to read other people’s essays . Some students feel like reading exemplar essays or essays their classmates have written is cheating, or that it would be stealing their ideas to read their essay. However, this is not the case.

Reading someone else’s essay is a great way to begin to evaluate your own writing. By marking essays or reading others and making mental notes about them, you can begin to apply the same principals to your own essays, as well as improving your writing overall.

Look at how they use quotes, their structure, their main points and their thesis, and compare them to how you write, and to the assessment objectives. Look at their analysis and whether their writing makes sense. This sort of analysis does not involve stealing ideas, but instead learning how best to structure your writing and create an individual style , learning from both good and bad essays.

You should also read widely around your texts in general. Read as much as you can, both texts related and unrelated to the ones you read in class, to gain a wide picture of literature. This will help you in unseen prose, but also widen your vocabulary overall, which in turn will improve your essays.

For more information on why reading is so important for students, please read this Think Student guide.

• Schools & departments

MA English Literature

UCAS code: Q306

Duration: 4 years

Delivery: Full-time

School: Literatures, Languages and Cultures

College: Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Introducing MA English Literature

Edinburgh is the first UNESCO World City of Literature, a fantastic literary city which many greats of English, Scottish and world literature have called home.

On this programme, you will develop your critical, analytic, linguistic and creative skills by engaging with a broad range of texts and a variety of approaches to reading.

You will explore the cultural contexts of writing in English from the late Middle Ages to the present, and select honours courses on the basis of your own interests in specific topics, periods or genres.

Studying literature prepares you to contribute to a society in which an understanding of texts of all kinds is crucially important. It shows an openness to ideas and perspectives other than your own, an essential attribute in many careers and a global marketplace.

Why Edinburgh

Edinburgh is a remarkable place to study, write, publish, discuss and perform prose, poetry and drama.

We are the oldest department of English and Scottish Literature in the UK, one of the longest-established in the world.

From the University's Special Collections to the National Library of Scotland, the city's resources for studying literature are exceptional.

Our programme is very flexible. In Years 1 and 2, in addition to studying English Literature, you will choose option courses from a broad list of disciplines. You will then specialise as you progress through your honours years.

What our students say

One of the best things about studying in Edinburgh is how the cultural history and contemporary social ethics interweave with literature's narrative to cultivate a great love in its study. With an extensive library and writing festivals, studying English Literature has been a thoroughly fulfilling experience. Carina, Year 4, English Literature MA (Hons)

What you will study

One of the most attractive characteristics of this four-year programme is its flexibility.

In Years 1 and 2, your pre-honours years, you will choose option courses from a wide range of disciplines in addition to your core subject of English Literature.

As well as broadening your education and skill set, this may enable you to change the focus of your programme in Years 3 and 4, your honours years.

You will take two Literary Studies courses. These will introduce you to the essential skills needed for the critical close reading of the core literary genres of:

You will read works of literature written in English from around the world, and encounter a range of ideas about the nature and purpose of literary study.

Option courses

You will complete your Year 1 studies with option courses chosen from a wide range offered by the University.

You can, for example, opt to study a language in its cultural context. We offer one of the widest ranges of languages of any UK university - the majority are suitable for complete beginners.

Other options include, but are not limited to, courses in:

• business, economics and informatics
• politics, social policy and social anthropology
• art and architectural history
• history, classics and archaeology
• Celtic and Scottish ethnology
• linguistics and language sciences
• philosophy, divinity and law

You will be introduced to the study of English literature in its cultural and historical contexts via a survey of literature from the late Medieval period to the mid-twentieth century.

These courses will explore the relationship between literary texts and the construction of national, international and imperial cultures.

As in Year 1, you will choose from a range of option courses. You can, for example, opt to:

• study Scottish Literature in a selection of major periods
• learn (or continue to learn) a language
• take classes in English Language and Linguistics
• do something completely different

This is the first of your honours years.

You will take two courses in Reading Theory which will introduce you to key issues, concepts, and developments in literary theory and criticism. You will be encouraged to reflect on the critical reading skills you have gained in your pre-honours years, and given the concepts and vocabulary to develop these further.

You will also start to specialise, choosing option courses that explore different literary periods, topics and approaches according to your area of interest and our staff expertise.

Depending on staff research and other commitments, we typically offer a wide range of courses to choose from over Years 3 and 4.

You will choose further honours-level courses from a very wide range of courses, including many exclusive to Year 4 students.

Building on all the knowledge and skills you have developed over four years, including in independent research, you will also complete a dissertation.

Programme structure

Find out more about the compulsory and optional courses in this degree programme.

To give you an idea of what you will study on this programme, we publish the latest available information. However, please note this may not be for your year of entry, but for a different academic year.

Programme structure (2024/25)

Where you will study

Our facilities.

When you are on campus, you can expect to spend most of your time in the University of Edinburgh's Central Area - in class, in the library, or in one of the University’s many social and support spaces.

The Central Area is located on the edge of Edinburgh's historic Old Town, surrounded by lots of green space.

Take a virtual tour of the Central Area

Libraries and collections

The Main University Library holds academic books, journals and databases, films and other media.

It is also the home of the University's Centre for Research Collections which brings together:

• more than 400,000 rare books
• six kilometres of archives and manuscripts
• thousands of works of art, historical musical instruments and other objects

The Centre's literary treasures include a truly exceptional collection of early Shakespeare quartos and other early modern printed plays, and the Corson Collection of works by and about Sir Walter Scott.

Highlights of its holdings in modern literature and poetry include the W.H. Auden collection and the libraries of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig.

Many of the University's Special Collections are digitised and available online from our excellent Resource Centre, computing labs and dedicated study spaces in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures ( LLC ).

Centres for research, teaching and outreach

We are home to the SWINC project and network, which promotes awareness of the richness and diversity of Scottish writing and culture in the 19th century.

We are the Scottish base of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke-Edinburgh edition, one of the major editorial projects in Victorian studies of the last half-century.

We are collaborators in the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network and have developing strengths in the Digital Humanities. For example, we have led both phases of LitLong, a digital transformation project to interactively map the ways in which Edinburgh has been used as a literary setting over the course of five centuries.

Events and activities

The Edinburgh University Students' Association ( EUSA ) supports more than 300 student-led societies and clubs, and promotes opportunities with local charities through its volunteering centre.

Across the University, there are lots of opportunities to get involved in:

• reading and writers' groups
• poetry slams
• creative writing and publishing
• student theatre

We also have a fantastic Writer-in-Residence who organises talks and workshops by visiting writers and runs our annual writing prizes. Their drop-in sessions give you the chance to:

• share your work
• get feedback
• meet other student writers
• get inspiration and prompts for new work

In the city

A UNESCO World City of Literature, Edinburgh is a remarkable place to study, write, publish, discuss and perform prose, poetry and drama.

The city's resources for studying literature are exceptional. Many of them are located close to the University's Central Area, making them easy to access between classes.

In addition to a fantastic range of publishing houses, bookshops, theatres, and cinemas, you will study near the:

• National Library of Scotland
• National Museum of Scotland
• Edinburgh Central Library
• Scottish Poetry Library
• Scottish Storytelling Centre
• Writers’ Museum

We have strong links with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which annually welcomes around 1,000 authors to our literary city.

Study abroad

In Year 3, you may have the opportunity to spend the year studying abroad through the University's international exchange programme. There are also shorter-term and virtual opportunities to study or work abroad throughout the four years, including over the summer months.

What are my options for going abroad?

Learning and assessment

How will i learn.

University is a place to plan your own goals under expert guidance, study independently and in groups, and reflect upon your learning throughout your degree.

Our approach to learning and teaching is active, inclusive and question driven, so it may be different to your experiences at school. It will help you gain the skills for life after university, and we will guide you through the steps from one phase to the next.

Depending on the size of your year group, and which option courses you take, your classes will typically fall into three categories:

In addition to these classes, to get the most out of your courses, you will need to read widely.

Lectures are taken by all students on a course, typically at the same time. They are delivered as interactive presentations which may involve audio-visual material.

Lectures are given by an experienced academic. They are designed to guide you through the background, questions and debates related to the topic you are studying.

Tutorial groups are smaller. They are also led by an academic, but here the emphasis is more on what you think about the topic yourself. So, tutorials are your chance to discuss and expand upon what you have learned in a lecture.

Seminars blend features of lectures and tutorials. Again, they are designed to encourage and facilitate your active participation in learning.

On some courses, you will have seminars instead of lectures, especially in your honours years (Years 3 and 4).

As well as the teaching staff and other staff members you will meet day-to-day, there are lots of ways to get help with your learning, including through the University’s Institute for Academic Development ( IAD ).

Additionally, the Students’ Association facilitates LitPALS, a peer support scheme bringing literature students together across year groups to help each other with specific study skills, topics or themes.

How will I be assessed?

You will be assessed through a combination of coursework and final assessments.

Coursework is generally completed throughout the year, while assessments take place at the end of a teaching block.

Coursework may take a range of forms to give you the opportunity to practice different skills. For example, you may be asked to:

• write an essay or learning journal
• respond to a piece of writing through close reading
• give a short talk or presentation
• record a podcast or video

In your final year, you will also complete a dissertation.

Career opportunities

Skills and experience.

Studying English Literature shows an openness to ideas and perspectives other than your own, an essential attribute in many careers and a global marketplace.

Beyond the literary, critical thinking and creative skills you will gain by engaging with a broad range of texts and a variety of approaches to reading on this programme, graduating with a four-year Master of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh shows intellectual maturity, resilience, and flexibility.

The skills you will be able to demonstrate to employers when you graduate include the ability to:

• understand, analyse and articulate complex issues and concepts
• manage your time to meet deadlines on different types of projects
• work independently and as part of a group

Opportunities across sectors

During your time with us, you will study a range of subjects, with the option to take courses in languages, and in other areas of the humanities and social sciences, for example.

As you progress through your honours years (Years 3 and 4), you will specialise in selected literary topics, periods or genres.

This breadth of education gives you the foundations to excel in a range of career sectors, especially those that value transferable humanities skills.

Our alumni have gone on to careers in the private, public, not-for-profit, and for-benefit sectors, sometimes through graduate training schemes where the ability to communicate well is essential in securing a competitive place.

Typical sectors include:

• business, finance and commerce
• communications, marketing, advertising and public relations
• creative writing, publishing, culture, heritage, and the arts
• education, outreach, advocacy and training
• journalism, broadcasting and media
• leisure, tourism and travel
• politics, policy work, diplomacy, civil service and law
• research, development and venture acceleration

Further study

The enhanced research skills you will develop on a four-year programme, particularly in your honours years, are a valuable asset if you wish to continue studying at postgraduate level.

At the University of Edinburgh, we typically offer:

• taught and research-led MSc degrees in English Literature
• MSc programmes in Playwriting and Creative Writing
• interdisciplinary MSc programmes in Comparative Literature and Intermediality

Each of these programmes is a good foundation for a PhD, but is equally of value as a stand-alone qualification.

Beyond literature and associated fields, a degree in English prepares you for further study in almost any humanities and social science discipline.

Careers advice

Throughout your time with us, we will encourage you to identify and hone your employability skills.

LLC has a dedicated Careers Consultant within the University's excellent Careers Service.

Through our careers service, you can:

• book one-to-one appointments and practice interviews
• access a range of online resources
• attend themed fairs such as the Creative and Cultural Careers Festival

Popular peer support includes Life After LLC , a panel event where you can draw inspiration from our recent graduates.

Be inspired by our alumni

Entry requirements

Standard entry requirement.

The standard entry requirement is:

• SQA Highers: AAAAA (achievement by end of S5 preferred). BBB must be achieved in one year of S4-S5.
• A Levels: A*AA.
• IB : 39 points with 666 at HL.

Minimum entry requirement

The minimum entry requirement for widening access applicants is:

• SQA Highers: ABBB by end of S6. BBB must be achieved in one year of S4-S5.
• A Levels: ABB.
• IB : 34 points with 655 at HL.

More information for widening access applicants

Required subjects

The grades used to meet our entry requirements must include:

• SQA : Highers: English at B.
• A Levels: English Literature or combined English at B.
• IB : HL: English at 5.

Find out more about entry requirements

International applicants

We welcome applications from students studying a wide range of international qualifications.

Entry requirements by country

International Foundation Programme

If you are an international student and your school qualifications are not accepted for direct entry to the University you may be eligible for admission to this degree programme through our International Foundation Programme.

Mature applicants

We welcome applications from mature students and accept a range of qualifications.

Mature applicant qualifications

English language requirements

Regardless of your nationality or country of residence, you must demonstrate a level of English language competency at a level that will enable you to succeed in your studies.

SQA , GCSE and IB

For SQA , GCSE and IB students, unless a higher level is specified in the stated entry requirements, a pass is required in English at the following grades or higher:

• SQA National 5 at C
• GCSE at C or 4
• Level 2 Certificate at C
• IB Standard Level at 5 (English ab initio is not accepted for entry)

English language tests

We accept the following English language qualifications at the grades specified:

• IELTS Academic: total 6.5 with at least 5.5 in each component.We do not accept IELTS One Skill Retake to meet our English language requirements.
• TOEFL-iBT (including Home Edition): total 92 with at least 20 in each component. We do not accept TOEFL MyBest Score to meet our English language requirements.
• C1 Advanced ( CAE ) / C2 Proficiency ( CPE ): total 176 with at least 162 in each component.
• Trinity ISE : ISE II with distinctions in all four components.
• PTE Academic: total 65 with at least 54 in each component. We do not accept PTE Academic Online.
• Oxford ELLT : 7 overall with at least 5 in each component.*

We also accept a wider range of international qualifications and tests.

Unless you are a national of a majority English speaking country, your English language qualification must be no more than three and a half years old from the start of the month in which the degree you are applying to study begins. If you are using an IELTS , PTE Academic, TOEFL, Oxford ELLT , or Trinity ISE test, it must be no more than two years old on the first of the month in which the degree begins, regardless of your nationality.

(*Revised 24 May 2024 to change PTE Academic requirement from total 62 with at least 54 in each component, and to clarify that we do not accept PTE Academic online. Revised 29 August 2024 to add Oxford ELLT requirements.)

Discover Uni data

This information is part of a government initiative to enhance the material that higher education institutions provide about their degree programmes.

It is one of many sources of information which will enable you to make an informed decision on what and where to study.

Please note that some programmes do not have Discover Uni data available.

Fees, costs and funding

Tuition fees.

Tuition fees for MA English Literature

Additional costs

There may be additional costs if you choose to study abroad in Year 3.

For more information on how much it will cost to study with us and the financial support available see our fees and funding information.

Fees and funding

• Have a query about undergraduate study?
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Degrees in English Literature and Scottish Literature

8 degrees in english literature and scottish literature.

• English and Scottish Literature (MA) QQ32
• English Literature (MA) Q306
• English Literature and Classics (MA) QQ38
• English Literature and History (MA) QVH1
• Scottish Literature (MA) Q531
• Scottish Literature and Classics (MA) QQH8
• Scottish Literature and History (MA) QVJ1
• Scottish Literature and Scottish History (MA) QV22

You may also be interested in

• Celtic and Scottish Literature (MA) Q590
• French and English Literature (MA) RQ13
• German and English Literature (MA) RQ23
• Italian and English Literature (MA) RQH3
• Philosophy and English Literature (MA) VQ53
• Philosophy and Scottish Literature (MA) VQ55
• Russian Studies and English Literature (MA) RQ73
• Spanish and English Literature (MA) RQ43
• How to apply
• Why choose English Literature and Scottish Literature

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English Literature, BA (Hons)

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Apply for English Literature, BA (Hons)

Where are you applying from, choose course variant, 3 year full time, 4 year full time with a year abroad, 4 year full time with a year in industry.

International students that have already submitted a UCAS application should apply via our Clearing System.

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Study English Literature and develop skills highly valued by employers

Key course details.

This course is available through Clearing

Clearing Help and Support 0808 175 3071

Course Overview

English Literature is one of the most diverse and challenging disciplines we offer.

Studying our three-year BA cultivates sensitivity towards language and seeks to answer some provocative questions. It also opens up a range of exciting career possibilities by helping you to develop transferable skills, which are highly valued by employers.

You will have the chance to explore over a thousand years of literature, from Beowulf to the present day. Our course covers national and global literature stretching from Renaissance literature, Gothic and genre fiction and 19th century literature through to modernity and contemporary fiction. Other exciting topics include gender and culture and creative and professional writing.

You will have the chance to spend a semester studying in the USA, Canada, China, Hong Kong or Singapore, further improving your career prospects. 

Why English Literature at Swansea?

Based on our stunning Singleton Park campus, in parkland overlooking Swansea Bay on the edge of the Gower Peninsula;

English at Swansea is ranked: 

• Top 25 in the UK for Student Satisfaction (Complete University Guide 2025)
• Top 101-150 in the World (QS World Rankings 2024) 
• Ranked 11th in UK for Research Impact (REF2021) 
• 97% of graduates are in employment &/or study, or doing other activities, such as travelling, 15 months after leaving Swansea University (HESA 2023)

Our academic staff are internationally recognised for their research. You will learn from experienced, established writers whose work has been widely published, broadcast and performed.

You will also have the option of a semester in the USA, Canada, China, Hong Kong or Singapore.

Your English Literature Experience

You can choose from a fascinating range of English Literature and creative writing topics to tailor your degree to your interests. 

We offer varied and flexible course content, so you can shape your course to your own interests, whether in Gothic and genre fiction, gender and culture, Renaissance literature, national and global literatures, modernity and contemporary writing, 19th century literature, or creative and professional writing.

Wales has a rich lyric tradition and Swansea is the birthplace of Dylan Thomas. You can be involved with projects with the Dylan Thomas Centre and the National Theatre Wales.

You will also have a personal tutor for any pastoral and academic support you may need, and the lively English Student Society at Swansea organises a range of literary, social and cultural events.

English Literature Employment Opportunities

Graduating with an internationally recognised degree in English will put you in a great position to succeed in a wide range of careers. You will develop excellent oral and writing skills, strong research and analytical skills, learn to present your ideas in a range of formats, solve problems, make informed decisions and manage your time and workload effectively. All this expertise will ensure you can compete successfully in the job market.

Our graduates enter careers in a wide range of sectors including:

• Social Media
• Project Administration

Your early studies will introduce you to how to become a successful scholar of English, critical reading, intertextual revision, how to write essays and an overview of the history of theatre.

You will then choose your pathway with modules to suit your own interests, before focusing in depth on your chosen research projects.

BA 3 Year Full-time

Year 1 (level 4), fheq 4 undergraduate / hecert.

Students choose 120 credits from the following:

Compulsory Modules

Optional Modules

Choose Minimum Of 40 credits from the following Modules:

NOTE : Select at least two and a maximum of three modules. In total, students must select no more than three modules per teaching block so need to select one module in TB1 and two modules in TB2. ** Students who wish to pursue a pair of modern language modules in the box below must gain permission from the programme director and select one module from this box (in TB2)

Choose Maximum Of 20 credits from the following Modules:

NOTE : If required, select one module ensuring no more than three modules in total have been selected in each teaching block. ** students may select one Modern Language module. Students who have selected a beginners language in TB1 may take the follow up course in TB2 at the discretion of the Programme Director

Year 2 (Level 5)

Fheq 5 undergraduate / hedip.

None found.

NOTE : Students must select at least TWO modules. Students may select all three modules which would complete their credits in semester one. Students must not take more than three modules in total in any one teaching block

NOTE : Students must select at least TWO modules. Students may select all three modules which would complete their credits in semester two. Students must not take more than three modules in total in any one teaching block

Choose Maximum Of 40 credits from the following Modules:

NOTE : Students may (but do not have to) choose one or two modules to make up 120 credits for the year. Do not select more than three modules in total in any one semester. ALE121 must have been completed in Year 1 to pursue ALE218 or ALE250. ALE108 must have been completed in Year 1 to pursue ALE200.

Year 3 (Level 6)

Fheq 6 undergraduate / honours.

Choose Minimum Of 80 credits from the following Modules:

NOTE : Select a minimum of 80 credits , and a maximum of 120 credits. Students must either select three modules in each semester, or the Dissertation module and two modules in each semester. NOTE: ** please note that acceptance on the English Literature dissertation is subject to the submission of a suitable proposal towards the end of year 2. .

NOTE : Select up to 40 credits if required to fulfill 120 credits in total for the year. . One 20 credit module in each semester maximum. Students must have completed a Creative Writing module if you wish to select EN-3026. Students MUST NOT select EN-3031 and EN-3026. Students must not exceed 60 credits in any one teaching block.

BA 4 Year Full-time (with a year abroad)

Year 3 (level 5s), fheq 5 undergraduate sandwich year.

Choose Exactly 120 credits from the following Modules:

NOTE : Students will have the opportunity to study abroad at one of our partner institutions and to experience different cultures.

Year 4 (Level 6)

NOTE : Select a minimum of 80 credits , and a maximum of 120 credits. Students must either select three modules in each semester, or the Dissertation module and two modules in each semester. NOTE: ** please note that acceptance on the English Literature dissertation is subject to the submission of a suitable proposal towards the end of year 2.

BA 4 Year Full-time (with a year in Industry)

Entry Requirements

We have vacancies across a variety of subjects for September 2024 entry – please call our Clearing Helpline on 0808 175 3071.

Are you an international student, waiting on exam results or an English Language test score? If so, we'd encourage you to apply through our free and easy to use direct application system , as you may be eligible for a conditional offer.

How You're Taught

We are proud to provide an outstanding educational experience, using the most effective learning and teaching approaches, carefully tailored to suit the specific needs of your course. Apart from a small number of online-only courses, most of our courses consist of in-person, on-campus teaching, enabling full engagement with your lecturers and fellow students.

Practical skills sessions, lab work seminars, and workshops predominantly take place in person, allowing for group working and demonstrations. We also operate virtual labs and Simulated Learning Environments which will facilitate greater access to training opportunities in the future. However, our approach also includes the use of some online learning to support and enhance traditional face-to-face teaching. 

Online learning may take place ‘live’ using software such as Zoom, allowing you to interact with the lecturer and other students and to ask questions. Lecture recordings also allow for more flexibility to revisit material, to revise for assessments and to enhance learning outside of the classroom. Some modules have extra resources in Canvas, such as videos, slides and quizzes enabling further flexible study.   

This course may offer some modules taught through the medium of Welsh or bilingually for students who consider themselves to be fluent Welsh speakers. For more details on the provision available see the Welsh Provision expander below.

Welsh Provision

No provision.

Unfortunately, there is currently no formal Welsh-medium provision on this course. If you would like to let us know that you are interested in pursuing an element of your course through the medium of Welsh, please email [email protected] to indicate your interest along with your year of entry and we will do our best to see what is possible.

Whilst this course does not offer academic content delivered in Welsh, the University can provide you with the following, and Academi Hywel Teifi is here to support you:

• An interview through the medium of Welsh when applying for a place.
• The option to receive your personal correspondence in Welsh, English or bilingually.
• The option to write and submit your coursework or exams through the medium of Welsh (even if you have chosen to study in English), and your work will be marked in Welsh.
• A Welsh-speaking Personal Tutor.
• One-to-one support to improve your academic Welsh language skills.
• An opportunity to gain an additional free qualification that serves as evidence of your Welsh language ability for future employers.
• Opportunity to be a member of the Swansea University Branch of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol.

To learn more about the above and all the opportunities available to you through the medium of Welsh, visit Academi Hywel Teifi's undergraduate pages .

Meet Your Lecturers

Our degrees are taught by experts, who have a wealth of knowledge to pass on to our students.

You can find out more about our academic expertise on our staff pages.

Tuition Fees

Fees for full time Undergraduate UK/EU students may be increased in subsequent years of study by an inflationary amount determined by Welsh Government.

Fees for full time Undergraduate International students will increase by 3% for each subsequent year of study.

During a sandwich year (e.g. year in industry, year abroad or placement year) a lower fee will apply. For more information visit our tuition fees page .

You can find further information of your fee costs on our tuition fees page .

You may be eligible for funding to help support your study. To find out about scholarships, bursaries and other funding opportunities that are available please visit the University's scholarships and bursaries page .

Current students: You can find further information of your fee costs on our tuition fees page .

Funding and Scholarships

You may be eligible for funding to help support your study.

To find out about scholarships, bursaries and other funding opportunities that are available please visit the University's scholarships and bursaries page.

Academi Hywel Teifi at Swansea University and the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol offer a number of generous scholarships and bursaries for students who wish to study through the medium of Welsh or bilingually. For further information about the opportunities available to you, visit the Academi Hywel Teifi Scholarships and Bursaries page.

Additional Costs

Access to your own digital device/the appropriate IT kit will be essential during your time studying at Swansea University. Access to wifi in your accommodation will also be essential to allow you to fully engage with your programme. See our dedicated webpages for further guidance on suitable devices to purchase, and for a full guide on getting your device set up .

You may face additional costs while at university, including (but not limited to):

• Travel to and from campus
• Printing, photocopying, binding, stationery and equipment costs (e.g. USB sticks)
• Purchase of books or texts
• Gowns for graduation ceremonies

Careers and Employability

Swansea Employability Academy (SEA) will support you at each stage of your career journey helping you build a bright future.

Our career support services include:

• Employability workshops, employers’ talks, bespoke events and careers fairs
• Individual advice and guidance from professionally qualified Careers Advisers
• Help with finding jobs, internships, work placements and volunteering opportunities
• Access to information resources on a wide range of career management topics
• Advice and guidance on postgraduate study and funding
• Funding to support student internship opportunities and Student Society/Club events.

We also provide help and advice for Swansea University Alumni up to two years after you graduate.

Academic Support

As well as subject specific support by college teaching staff and your personal tutor, the Centre for Academic Success provides courses, workshops and one-to-one support in areas such as:

• Academic writing
• Maths and statistics
• Critical thinking
• Time management
• Digital skills
• Presentation skills
• Note taking
• Revision, memory and exam techniques
• English language skills (if English is not your first language).

In addition, if you have a Specific Learning Difficulty (SpLD), disability, mental health or medical condition, the Centre for Academic Success have Specialist Tutors to support your learning, working alongside the Disability Office and Wellbeing Service to support all your needs and requirements whilst studying at Swansea University.

We care about our students and our aim is to ensure that you achieve the best degree classification. We have a personal mentoring system where you will be allocated a personal tutor. We also have an “open door” policy where our academic teachers are available to talk to you at any time about any queries or academic concerns you may have.

Study Abroad and Global Opportunities

To learn more about study abroad, visit our Go Global webpages . Enrolment on a programme with a semester/year abroad does not guarantee you a semester/year abroad placement. Spaces are limited and subject to a competitive selection process. In the event you do not secure a semester/year abroad placement, you will be transferred to the standard variant of your degree scheme without a semester or year abroad.

International summer programmes are open to students from all schools. Programmes typically range from 2 to 6 weeks, across destinations such as China, Zambia, South Korea, Japan, Canada and across Europe. For more information about programmes and eligibility visit our Summer Abroad webpages .

How to Apply

UK applicants: Apply now via Clearing

For further information please see our Guide to Clearing .

International applicants: If you don't have all of your results yet, apply using our free direct application system and we'll consider making you a conditional offer. Be sure to check our application deadlines before you submit.

EU applicants: visa and immigration information is available and will be regularly updated on our Information for EU students page .

Application Deadlines

We recommend that you submit your application to our courses as early as you can in advance of our application deadlines. Courses will close earlier than the application deadlines listed if all available places are filled. You can find further information on our Application Deadlines webpage.

Additional Information

Make an undergraduate enquiry

International students contact our International Team

English Literature with a Year Abroad, BA (Hons)

English literature with a year in industry, ba (hons).

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Writing About Literature

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Writing about Literature combines detailed practical and scholarly advice with a sense of the scope and creative possibilities of literary criticism, empowering the student reader to make his or her own discoveries and experiments with language. In addition, it gives valuable guidance on adult language learning and translation skills for students of foreign literature.

This handy, accessible guide covers all aspects of the essay-writing process, including:

• preliminary reading and choosing and researching a topic
• referencing and presentation
• computer use
• style, structure, vocabulary, grammar and spelling
• the art and craft of writing
• scholarly and personal insights into the problems and pleasures of writing about literature.

Written in an entertaining and informative way and containing a wealth of practical advice and scholarly insights, this wise, witty and helpful book should be on every literature student's bookshelf.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 3  pages, introduction, chapter 2 | 18  pages, chapter 3 | 12  pages, chapter 4 | 2  pages, essay topics, chapter 5 | 3  pages, chapter 6 | 22  pages, chapter 7 | 3  pages, some common bad advice, chapter 8 | 31  pages, spelling, punctuation and grammar, chapter 9 | 21  pages, foreign languages and literature, chapter 10 | 7  pages, 0 referencing, chapter 11 | 6  pages, 1 presentation, chapter 12 | 3  pages, 2 will-power.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Introduction

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

What Makes a Good Literature Paper?

An argument.

When you write an extended literary essay, often one requiring research, you are essentially making an argument. You are arguing that your perspective-an interpretation, an evaluative judgment, or a critical evaluation-is a valid one.

A debatable thesis statement

Like any argument paper you have ever written for a first-year composition course, you must have a specific, detailed thesis statement that reveals your perspective, and, like any good argument, your perspective must be one which is debatable.

You would not want to make an argument of this sort:

Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about a young man who seeks revenge. That doesn't say anything-it's basically just a summary and is hardly debatable.

A better thesis would be this:

Hamlet experiences internal conflict because he is in love with his mother. That is debatable, controversial even. The rest of a paper with this argument as its thesis will be an attempt to show, using specific examples from the text and evidence from scholars, (1) how Hamlet is in love with his mother, (2) why he's in love with her, and (3) what implications there are for reading the play in this manner.

You also want to avoid a thesis statement like this:

Spirituality means different things to different people. King Lear , The Book of Romans , and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance each view the spirit differently. Again, that says nothing that's not already self-evident. Why bother writing a paper about that? You're not writing an essay to list works that have nothing in common other than a general topic like "spirituality." You want to find certain works or authors that, while they may have several differences, do have some specific, unifying point. That point is your thesis.

Lear , Romans , and Zen each view the soul as the center of human personality. Then you prove it, using examples from the texts that show that the soul is the center of personality.

Trinity College launched the Gould Prize for Essays in English Literature in 2013. This is an annual competition for Year 12 or Lower 6th students. The Prize has been established from a bequest made by Dr Dennis Gould in 2004 for the furtherance of education in English Literature. This Essay Prize has the following aims. First, to encourage talented students with an interest in English Literature to explore their reading interests further in response to questions about the subject. Second, to encourage students with an interest in literature to apply for a University course in English. Finally, to recognise the achievements of high-calibre students from whatever background they may come, as well as the achievements of those who teach them.

Candidates are invited each year to submit an essay of between 1,500 and 2,500 words in answer to a question from our list.

Candidates must write their essays entirely on their own: that is, without help from their school or from artificial intelligence. Your essay should represent your most ambitious, original, and imaginative critical work. We are not looking for submissions in creative writing. We also expect a close engagement with the prompt. Essays can be written on all works of literature composed originally in the English language, from anywhere in the world. Also eligible are all works of literature originally written in the British Isles in any other language (e.g.. Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Irish, French, Latin, Greek, etc). Excluded are works from beyond the British Isles that were not originally written in English (e.g. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina ).

The 2024 competition has closed.

The deadline is 12 noon UK time on 1 August 2024; late submissions cannot be accepted. Results will be announced around mid-September.

The competition carries a First Prize of £600, to be split equally between the candidate and his or her school or college, and a Second Prize of £400, which again is to be shared equally between the candidate and his or her school or college.  The school or college’s portion of each prize will be issued in the form of book tokens with which to buy books of or about English literature (under the broad definition set out above).  In addition, further deserving essays of a high quality will receive high commendations or commendations.  Authors of prize-winning and highly commended essays will be invited to visit the College.

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Past Gould Prize-winners

First Prize: Megan Ng (St Swithun’s School) Joint Second Prize: Orla Grist (Latymer Upper School); Angelica Read (St. Paul’s Girls’ School)

First Prize: Hazel Morpurgo (Colyton Grammar School) Second Prize: Livia Ursini Parker (North London Collegiate School)

Joint First Prize: Ruby Deakin (High Storrs School, Sheffield) Naomika Saran (The Shri Ram School, India)

First Prize: Mr L Beevers (Heckmondwike Grammar School) Second Prize: Miss E Connor (Kings Norton Girls’ School)

First Prize: Miss M Wu (Wellington College) Second Prize: Miss Crosbie-Chen (Westminster School)

First Prize: Miss E McNeill (Notting Hill & Ealing High School) Second Prize: Miss J Cartwright (St Aidan’s and St John Fisher’s Associated Sixth Form)

First Prize: Mr B Jureidini (Esher College) Second Prize: Miss E Laurence (South Hampstead High School)

First Prize: Miss H Smith (Chelmsford County High School for Girls) Second Prize: Mr C Graff (University College School, London)

First Prize: Miss M Little (Bexhill College) Second Prize: Miss M Abdel-Razek (Wimbledon High School)

Joint First Prize: Miss M Benham (King Edward VI Five Ways School, Birmingham) Mr E Patel (Merchant Taylor’s School, Northwood)

Joint First Prize: Miss A Cattley (Saffron Walden County High School) Miss E Cavell (St Paul’s Girls’ School)

First Prize: Miss E Franklin (King Edward’s Sixth Form College, Stourbridge) Second Prize: Miss J Simms (Greenhead College, Huddersfield)

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