Review of Literature Guidelines

            The purpose of a Review of Literature is to inform your reader of the nature of the critical response to your selected work.  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.  You will be doing something very similar—just not as long—as “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw” that appears in our case book beginning on page 189.

            Since you have already collected at least twenty critical essays on your text, your job for this assignment is to categorize and organize these resources.   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.  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 40).  Use topic sentences to organize your material.

Development – Within the body, give a brief summary of each secondary work—the major argument.  You may use one relevant statement from each, but try to put the argument in your own words.  Use appropriate transitions within paragraphs and between paragraphs that link works within schools and link schools to one another by adding, contrasting, comparing, etc.

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?

3.  Works Cited

Be sure to cite your sources correctly within the body of your essay.

This Review of Literature should be between 5 and 8 pages.