Review of Literature Guidelines
Due March 21, in print and through turnitin.com
The purpose of a Review of Literature is to inform your reader of the nature of the critical response to your selected work by examining the relationships among the different articles you've found on it. In other words, you will be giving an overview of the secondary sources for your chosen text that you previously listed in your Annotated Bibliography. If you have found additional works since you completed your Annotated Bibliography that you would like to include in your Review of Literature, you may certainly include them.
Since you have already collected at least eighteen critical essays on your text, your job for this assignment is to categorize and organize these resources. You should use at least fifteen sources in all. Your Review of Literature should discuss these works in light of one another with some overriding organizational principle. Your review should contain the following:
1.An introduction with a thesis—Your thesis should state the main idea of your review, that is, the types of works you found, concentrating on the theoretical approaches taken in the sources detailed in your annotated bibliography, and indicating whether or not any type of criticism dominates. If no single type dominates, indicate what you believe the reason might be.
2. Body –
Organization - Organize your essay according to major trends in criticism rather than chronologically. Using the types of critical approaches, group similar types together, regardless of the publication date. (You may have feminist essays that span a period of 10 years or New Critical essays that span 30). If you have an assortment of articles "left over"--each representing a different type of theory, see if you can group them into paragraphs by similarity (similar theory, similar subject matter, similar characters examined...), or use the fact that they are all "left overs" as their similarity. Use topic sentences to organize your material.
Development – Within the body, point back to the brief summary of each secondary work you've given in your Annotated Bibliography—the major argument. (If you're including an article not mentioned in your AB, you'll need to summarize it briefly). You do not need to rewrite what you've said in your AB; assume your reader has it in front of her (because I will) .Instead of writing 2-6 sentences about each work, as you did in the AB, you may refer back to it and write a sentence or two denoting the relationships you see between the different articles that take the same approach. An example might look something like this: "While Anderson and Houck both write from a psychoanalytic slant, Anderson's analysis is more Lacanian and linguistic in nature, examining how Goldilocks' use of language pinpoints her desire and situates her as a subject in the house of the three bears. Houck's reading is Jungian, analyzing Goldilocks' growth through her interaction with objects in the house that symbolize her animus." Use appropriate transitions within paragraphs and between paragraphs that link works within schools and link schools to one another by adding, contrasting, comparing, etc.
3. Conclusion – Summarize the current state of critical studies of your work. What approaches seem to predominate in recent years? Has your work received less or more critical attention in recent years? Why?
4. Works Cited --Be sure to cite your sources correctly within the body of your essay and on a Works Cited page.
This Review of Literature should be between 4 and 6 pages.
Helpful Hints:
Do identify the types of theory by which you are organizing the articles in your topic sentences.
Do use the titles of the articles to introduce them; many times, a title will tell your reader a lot about the article for you.