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The analysis may focus on literary elements such as setting, character, plot and theme. It may also focus on literary devices such as foreshadowing, point of view, irony, metaphor and symbolism. Your analysis will discuss why the elements and devices you choose to discuss are significant and meaningful to the story.
explaining or interpreting how its parts work together. A literary analysis is a paper on one, or many, of the key elements in a text and how they support a main idea or purpose. When writing a literary analysis, you are not just identifying elements in a text, but analyzing those specific elements. Step 1: Identify the Author’s Purpose
The analysis can explore how different elements in a story relate to each other or how they connect to a larger political, social, economic, or religious context. Examples of story elements for analysis: What are the themes.
The purpose of a literary analysis essay is to carefully examine and sometimes evaluate a work of literature or an aspect of a work of literature. As with any analysis, this requires you to break the subject down into its component parts.
- Step 1: Reading The Text and Identifying Literary Devices
- Step 2: Coming Up with A Thesis
- Step 4: Writing The Body of The Essay
- Step 5: Writing A Conclusion
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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 writi...
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: Your thesis statementsh...
The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.
Theconclusionof 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, highlighti...
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Analysis helps readers to understand how a piece of literature works and how it conveys specific ideas or creates specific effects on readers. Think like a scientist who examines the individual aspects of a specimen.
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Literary analysis involves examining all the parts of a novel, play, short story, or poem—elements such as character, setting, tone, and imagery—and thinking about how the author uses those elements to create certain effects.
