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Literary criticism is the comparison, analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of works of literature. Literary criticism is essentially an opinion, supported by evidence, relating to theme, style, setting or historical or political context. It usually includes discussion of the work’s content and integrates one's own ideas with other insights gained from research. Literary criticism may have a positive or a negative bias and may be a study of an individual piece of literature or an author’s body of work.
Although criticism may include some of the following elements in order to support an idea, literary criticism is NOT a plot summary, a biography of the author, or simply finding fault with the literature.
Researching, reading, and writing works of literary criticism will help you to make better sense of the work, form judgments about literature, and study ideas from different points of view.
Examples of some types of literary criticism are:
Literary criticism can be found collected in book form (use the catalog link to the left to search for it), or through the following sources.
Explore an authoritative source of literary criticism, summarizing authors' lives and works and including excerpts from scholarly articles. Includes literature criticism for these genres and time periods: classical and medieval; contemporary; drama; 1400-1800; 19th century; poetry; Shakespearean; short stories; 20th century. IMPORTANT NOTE: Because this source is an encyclopedic work, it should NEVER be directly cited. Always look up the original source of the excerpted and reprinted articles. Coverage: varies. Mostly full text.
You can also search these databases for literary criticism, it may help to use the keyword "criticism" in your search.