CollegeWriting.info: "Literary Review" Home Page

1. First, choose roles, then make up a book you all have read and hate. Write the name of the book and its author and write a realistic 50-word advertising blurb for the back cover. Next, write a biography of the author. Finally, write a section each of description (be completely factual), interpretation (offer several), and evaluation (offer several) using the directions from this chapter.

3. Practice the divisions of a review by reviewing this course as a group. Divide into groups with roles as above. Then use descriptions, interpretations, and evaluations step by step from the chapter, above, to describe, interpret, and evaluate this course.

4. Practice the divisions of a review by using circle sentencing. Do this as a whole class. First, everyone should get out a sheet of lined paper and write "1. I would evaluate [the name of a famous movie star] as [an emotional feeling]. Fill in the blanks with the name of a star everyone knows and a strong emotional reaction. Second, everyone should pass this paper to the next person clockwise or in his/her row, read the new paper in front of her, then write "2. Here is a completely logical description of this star's appearance: _____________________," and fill in the blank. Third, everyone should pass the paper to the next person again, read the new paper before him or her, and then write "3. Here is factual description of this star's personality: ____________________," and fill in the blank. Then you should pass the paper and read it again, and this time the new reader should write "4. Here is a factual description of this star's acting: ______________________," and fill in the blank. The paper should be passed and read several more times and several more sentences should be added: step 5 is "Here is one possible interpretation of this person's acting: _______," step 6 is a second possible interpretation, and step 7 is a third possible interpretation. Then steps 8, 9, and 10 are one possible evaluation each (preferably each is quite different) of this person's acting (using the list of evaluatory categories from the "Organizing" section). Step 11 is a final evaluatory conclusion that repeats the initial evaluatory statement.

5. Practice proper citation and punctuation of quotations using circle sentencing. Start by using the same exercise as above in #5, and by beginning with the same #1 sentence. Pass the papers as above, then for the #2 sentence and each sentence after that, write a quote with the author first, the quote in quotation marks, and the page number afterward, which helps prove the #1 sentence. Pass the papers after each sentence has been written. Read the more interesting results.

6. Evaluate each other's papers in groups before grading. Number off into groups of four to five people. Using grading guidelines given to you by your instructor (or the "Contents" and "Organization" sections of the "Checklist" near the end of this chapter), evaluate whether each other's papers are ready for grading or need revising in each of the grading-guideline categories. You may help evaluate others’ papers even if yours is not ready or, for some reason, you do not wish to share it. Read two or three papers by others, and make written comments about the papers (or on a separate sheet of paper) for their authors to take home. At home, review what others have said about your paper. Pay attention in particular to comments that may have been repeated.

Journaling/Prewriting about this WSW Chapter: Keeping a journal about your reading of this chapter is an excellent method of thinking about it and preparing to write the paper it describes. Here are some journaling techniques you can try individually or together:

Journaling/Prewriting about this WSW Chapter: An excellent way to improve both our writing and our thinking is to journal about our reading process. Writing about our reading is a form of thinking. Journaling is an informal or beginning process of thinking--before we go on to more formal methods of thinking by writing literary analyses or reviews. Here are some possible methods or subjects for journaling. If you must first write down what the literary work is about, summarizing the plot, you may do that separately. However, for journaling about--thinking about--the literary work, do not just summarize. Respond to one or more of these suggestions:

1. Explain what the best and worst parts were of the process of reading this literary work, and why (i.e., was this literary work difficult to read, easy, or what--and why?).

2. Explain what the best and worst parts are of the final result--how you feel afterward, what you know that is new, what you have always known that has been reinforced and why, and perhaps what you now know but perhaps wish you didn't--and why.

3. If you had this work to read over again, what would you change, what would you keep the same, and why?

4. Name some people with whom you would share this book, and some with whom you would not, and in each case, why.

5. What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of this literary work? Why do these strengths and weaknesses exist? How, possibly, could this work be written to get rid of the weaknesses?

6. Discuss how and why you think this literary reading was chosen to be part of the course and/or part of the college reader in which it is found. If you were to replace it with a different reading for this course, what reading would you choose and why?

Writing a Rough Draft of the Chapter Paper: Write a rough-draft paper using the instructions in this chapter and the major subtitles suggested in the directions (200-500+ w. as assigned).

We can more fully appreciate and understand literature if we examine it and share this examination with others. The type of examination we will look at in this chapter is a literary review for a public audience. We should assume the audience has not yet read the work of literature. Our role in writing a review can be to imagine that we are a literary critic writing a newspaper or magazine review of a literary work. Our audience is the readers of the newspaper or magazine. Our need is to offer a review of the literary work by describing, interpreting, and evaluating it, so that readers may decide whether they will read it. This kind of examination of literature is called a "literary review" and may be easier to write well if we have mixed feelings about the literary work we review--or we actively dislike it.

Offer an evaluative conclusion of a work of literature--how it is well or poorly written or constructed. Then build up to this conclusion by using three to four body divisions: In the first--optional--division, summarize details of the author's life that relate to the work. In the second division, describe in unbiased terms the work itself. In the third, offer several possible interpretations of the work. And in the fourth, give several evaluations of the work's quality as a work of art.

The final literary examination also should have an introduction and a conclusion that summarize and that you should print in standard essay form.

Here are three major steps of focusing during the writing process. Each is further divided (in most chapters) into two sub-steps. Remember that you may rearrange or otherwise change the steps shown here to suit your individual writing needs.

Brainstorm: Skim this chapter and its samples. Choose a work you do not like, then imagine you must write a news review of it. Start with a list of ideas or images.

Create a Rough Draft: Quickly write a rough draft. Do not organize unless doing so makes the writing easier.

Evaluate: Read the chapter and samples. Then evaluate how best to organize your rough draft.

Revise: Consider audience knowledge of the literary work. Use lots of Q's and/or P's from the work to prove and explain your points. Develop a serious, formal tone and style.

Edit: When you are done with bigger changes, polish. Fix grammatical usage, spelling, and punctuation. Quote, paraphrase, and cite correctly.

Start brainstorming by feeding your brain: skim this chapter for several minutes or read this page. Skim the sample papers. Notice that the heart of a literary review is an evaluative conclusion using descriptions, interpretations, and evaluations to reach this conclusion.

When brainstorming your paper, here are some ways to start. If you wish, you may combine more than one:

To get started, try you need to consider whether you can choose what you want to read. A literary review probably will be easiest to write if you dislike --or having strongly mixed feelings about--your literary reading. If your instructor assigned your reading to you, then you will need to write a review according to how you felt about the reading.

To write about your literary work well, you will need to read it at least two to three times. Once you have read your assignment and skimmed this chapter and its samples, you may start rough drafting. There are several ways to rough draft.

Then express your thinking on paper. Choose one idea and explore it: write quickly and spontaneously. Avoid worrying about grammar, spelling, or punctuation. You may entirely avoid organization, or you may use the organizational parts suggested either earlier in this chapter's introductory "Process" page, or in the "Organize" section later in this chapter. You may write using regular prose sentences and paragraphs, creating one giant paragraph, or developing a traditional or cluster outline. Try to write one-fourth to one-half or more of the final required length of the paper.

Be sure that you have skimmed the sample papers before proceeding. There are three separate ways given immediately below for rough drafting. The first way, summarizing the elements, is a good way to start if you are unsure about the contents or meaning of the literary work you have just read, and you want to get to know it better before examining it. The second and third ways, a rough-draft analysis and rough-draft review, are better for getting the organization of your final paper started. Your teacher may ask you to use one specific method or another--or possibly a combination of them. If you are choosing, read the directions for all three rough-draft methods and select the one best suited to your needs.

One way to brainstorm a first-draft examination of literature is to summarize some of the basic elements of the literary work you have read. The elements of literature already have been well discussed in the "Literary Analysis" chapter: return to it for understanding what to look for when searching for and then describing the elements of the work you have read.

However, there is a difference in how you present these elements. In the "Analysis" chapter, you were told to present the elements to an academic or literary audience that, it is likely, already has read the work you are describing. You also were told to present the elements in order from the smallest detail to the broadest (e.g., from use of descriptions of scene and character to broader symbols and plot, and then to themes and arguments). However, when you are writing a literary review, you are writing for a different audience: a public audience, not an academic one. In addition, your audience not only will not have read the work; moreover, it is reading your review in order to make a decision about whether to read the work you are reviewing. For this reason, you must place the elements of literature in a different order: use the order that will make it easiest for your readers to get a sense of the entire work.

Thus it likely will be best to start your review’s "Description" section by offering your readers the outlines of the plot and setting, with characters following soon after. Remember when you describe the plot to not write a summary of the entire work’s events or action, but rather to break the plot into discreet parts: hero/heroines, villains/obstacles, and resolutions/outcomes. Likewise, when you describe setting and characters, do not just summarize casually, but rather use such basic descriptive systems as the five W’s of journalism, the five senses, and historical/psychological/social facts.

Continue on, then, to such elements as voice, tone, language, and symbols, and offer your readers an understanding of what some of the likely major themes are. When you discuss themes, keep to the obvious ones. If you see other themes, ones that are arguable, consider saving those more interpretive themes for the second body section.

A third way to brainstorm a first-draft examination of literature is to begin making a literary review immediately. To write a review, remember that your role is that of a newspaper or magazine critic who is writing to readers who have not yet read the literary work you are writing about. You must review the work for them, helping them decide whether it is worth reading, by describing the work, interpreting it, and evaluating it.

How should you describe, interpret, and evaluate? First, when learning how to use these three functions, it is best to carefully keep the functions separate. When you describe, do only that. When you interpret, do not let evaluations also creep in. In addition, when you evaluate, do so thoroughly. Each of these three functions is a step with the second built upon the first, and the third built upon the second. If you do the first step well, the second step will be easier. If you do the second step well, the third step will be easier.

DESCRIPTIONS: Simply describe what is actually there. Give the facts--a summary of the important details--with which no one would disagree. In other words, summarize briefly the literary elements described above as they exist in your chosen literary work, starting with the larger elements such as theme, voice, tone, plot, and setting, and ending with smaller details such as characters, symbols, language, and other descriptions. Try to touch upon all or most of the elements, and do so evenly without too much time or space devoted to just one or two elements. Stick to describing only what is actually there--do not comment on whether you like or dislike something, and don't try to interpret any meanings. Stick with obvious facts.

You may also describe facts about the author's life--without speculating about their meaning. However, most of your descriptions should deal with the elements of literature as used in the work you have read, and not with the author's life. In addition, remember to be brief--do not allow descriptions to overwhelm the equally or more important interpretations and evaluations.

INTERPRETATIONS: Offer interpretations of what you think the author might have intended as the purpose(s) of this literary work--what did he or she want to accomplish or have happen? Why did the author write it as she did? In addition to these author-centered interpretations, you may also offer reader-centered interpretations: what meanings and purposes might the readers find in it that relate to them psychologically, socially, ethically, emotionally, or in any other way, and why?

As you interpret, stick just to doing that. If you feel the need for more descriptions, add them to the descriptions section. And as you interpret, don't jump ahead to evaluation: don't yet evaluate whether some part of the literary work is well or poorly done, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant. Save these evaluatory comments for the evaluation section only.

EVALUATIONS: Evaluations is based on sound descriptions and interpretations. Once the first two steps have been accomplished, it is possible to judge how well or poorly the literary work has been written. Here are some of the possible judgments you can make. Answer some of these questions, especially about important or key parts of the literary work, and explain why the judgment is true using details from the work:

Other evaluatory questions also are possible. For a rough draft, you may want to work on the answers to just one or two important questions, or you may want to briefly answer as many of the questions as possible. Your ultimate goal will be to discuss the answers to several of these evaluatory questions in detail.

That is how to make a rough-draft review. If you give your rough-draft review to other students or a teacher for a judgment of how you are doing, be sure that a majority of the rough draft includes both interpretations and evaluations. These two steps are the more difficult ones and the ones most in need of judgment and suggestions from others.

A literary review has its uses in the worlds of school and work. The three steps of reviewing--describing, interpreting, and evaluating--are among the most 12 basic steps of good critical thinking: in chemistry and biology, for example, good experimental procedure asks that you first describe the factual details of your experiment; second, offer possible interpretations of the results; and third, evaluate how well or poorly the experiment was conducted. In academic research in any field, you first must gather the details (do the research), then examine the details for possible interpretations, and then evaluate these interpretations--why and how some are correct and others are wrong. Describing, interpreting, and evaluating are three steps at the core of good, thorough intellectual thinking.

Similarly in the world of work, describing, interpreting, and evaluating are essential to good business, both as a method of creative growth and as a method of cautious appraisal. Those in the business world who help make decisions must be able to do the following: (1) examine any situation without personal bias or prejudice to see all the relevant facts; (2) perceive several possible interpretations, points of view, or recommendations, employees, or customers in any given situation; and (3) evaluate the positives and negatives of each interpretation, point of view, or recommendation, employee, or customer. Good business thinking is good critical thinking, and describing, interpreting, and evaluating is a common pattern of thinking in the business world.

Start thinking critically about your paper by reading the chapter and the sample papers carefully. Then ask yourself, "How well can my rough draft meet the needs of this paper?" Some rough drafts may fit closely while others may require shifting of tone or parts. Still other rough drafts may need partial or complete rewriting.

Use a set of criteria--a series of judgments--to help you evaluate whether and how your rough draft meets the assignment needs. Here are some possible criteria to consider:

Rough drafts are helpful starters for your thinking. The next step, however, requires evaluation of what you need to do with your rough draft to make it work best for this writing assignment. Sometimes this evaluation is simple, but sometimes it can be more complex. If it is complex, using the criteria above can help break the evaluation down into easier steps.

The next step is to organize your paper. If you have done the brainstorming well--especially if you have chosen to start your brainstorming by writing the beginning of a review--then organizing should not be difficult. There are several ways to move from your rough draft to a more organized draft. If your rough draft is very rough, you may need to create divisions as described below by starting with a topic sentence for each, summarizing what you will say in that division. If you’ve already developed your rough draft by divisions, then you will need to polish these divisions and be sure that each one starts with a strong topic sentence. You may also want to use subtitles or space breaks between divisions to show where each new division begins. It is not traditional to do so; however, if you were to look in professional literary journals, you would find that many modern literary scholars do use some kind of divisional dividers.

Organize by divisions. Remember that the most important part of your writing as you organize is to have large numbers of quotes and paraphrases detailing your divisions. The introductions, divisions, and conclusions themselves will have these elements:

(l) Introduction: Write an opening paragraph which summarizes in one sentence each or less (a) the author and title of the literary work and (b) your overall evaluation. The "overall evaluation" sentence would summarize in some way your final judgment or statement of value of the literary work. In longer or more fully developed papers, there may also be (c) a more formal detail, quotation, or example from the literary work, an example that typifies or best illustrates your thesis or evaluation.

(2) Background (optional): If you wish, you may write a brief biographical sketch of the author. This might include his/her previous works of interest or significance to your readers, his/her life and how it may have resulted in this or other works, and any awards or other literary or public recognition he/she has received. In other words, if you choose to write this section, offer readers the kind of informed background about the author that they might want reviewed or find interesting or helpful in deciding whether to read the reviewed literary work. Remember, however, to keep this section brief (just one or two paragraphs is sufficient) and to keep everything in it relevant to the work you are reviewing.

(3) Body: After the introduction, there are three divisions. Regular newspaper and magazine reviewers often mix these divisions much more than suggested here; however, keeping the three divisions well separated as intellectual functions or steps makes thinking about and using them easier to do correctly. Each of the divisions has been described in detail in the "Brainstorming" section above. Each division may be one or more paragraphs, and each division should be roughly the same size as the other divisions: do not spend a long of time and space on "descriptions" and have short "interpretations" and "evaluations" divisions. The main purpose of the review paper is to require the development of a number of different interpretations and evaluations. Here is how each division may appear:

(3) Conclusion: Write a closing paragraph which summarizes in one sentence each or less (a) the author or title of the literary work and (b) a closing restatement of your thesis or overall evaluation. In longer or more fully developed papers, there may also be (c) a final formal detail, quotation, or example from the literary work exemplifying your thesis or evaluation.

We can develop our metacognitive thinking skills (our skills in "thinking about thinking") better by working in several additional ways with literature. One way is to compare and contrast two differing literary works. A second is to add "opposing thoughts" sections to our literary reviews.

Comparison and contrast as a thinking tool is an important form of evaluation in developing critical thinking skills when writing literary reviews. The basic idea is simple: in the evaluation section, you write about not only the literary work which you are critiquing, but also one or more other works that are similar. Some writers may also make such comparisons and contrasts in the interpretations section as well. It often is easier to show readers why some part or element of a literary work does or does not work well by comparing the work with one or more other literary works.

For example, it is possible to compare and contrast the idea of justice in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men by comparing and contrasting it to Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. There are many comparisons and contrasts we can make about how justice is illustrated and symbolized in these two novels. We might evaluate Mice as delivering its message about justice in a more shocking way--stronger in obvious effect than Mockingbird--but at the same time, we might judge Mice as being too obvious: Mockingbird's message about justice is delivered in a much more subtle--and therefore possibly more powerful--mode, thus affecting us more deeply or broadly.

An "Opposing thoughts" section also is something you can add to your literary review. Such a section offers interpretations and/or evaluations that differ from your own. In an opposing-thoughts section, you would first present the ideas of those who would disagree with you, give supporting reasons and details for their ideas, and then show (sometimes with more details) why their ideas are wrong.

In a critical literary review, opposing thoughts often are better placed as one or more paragraphs at the end of the "Interpretations" division and again at the end of the "Evaluations" division. In each division, first you would offer opposing interpretations or evaluations, then you would provide supporting reasons and details, and finally you would offer reasons (and details) proving why these interpretations or evaluations are incorrect. Some writers are, however, able to add opposing thoughts, a few sentences at a time, into many of the paragraphs of the various divisions. Most writers, though, find it simpler to add opposing thoughts in complete sections as described here.

Rewrite what you have done. Literary examinations contain many references to the literary works that they examine. These references are the proofs or examples of the points you make. You will need to know how to write these references smoothly and sensibly. In addition, as you rewrite, you should be sure that all your details are in the divisions where they best fit, and that you do not have anything in your divisions which does not fit there. In addition, be sure that you have strong topic sentences at the beginnings of your divisions.

A literary review is simply an in-depth discussion of one or more aspects of a literary work. This chapter has explained the steps for completing this assignment and has shown outlines of the final product. The best reviews are thoughtful explorations of how to view literary works, explorations that challenge and interest both the writers of these papers and their 24 readers as well.

In "The Demon Lover" from The Oxford Book of Short Stories, Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen paints an emotionally sterile, haunted world. Bowen writes in the voice of a lost soldier, “I shall be with you.... sooner or later. You won't forget that. You need do nothing but wait" (349). The inevitability portrayed in that statement, many editors of short fiction insist, conveys the fate of the predominantly alienated and passive citizens of the war-ravaged twentieth century. "The Demon Lover's" inclusion in so many anthologies, however, is due to such interpretations that ignore, yet share, the author's nostalgia and disillusionment for her family's once privileged view from the Anglo-Irish Big Houses of English rule in Ireland.

Biographical information on the author lends insight to an understanding of "The Demon Lover." Elizabeth Bowen was a product of the tradition of Protestant Ascendancy, a term, according to W. J. McCormack in his Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History, that "has come to name (or rather postulate) an eighteenth-century ruling elite, quasiaristocratic in kind and yet somehow unique to Ireland" (21). An only child born into a middle-class Protestant family of Dublin and Cork County, Bowen was a product of an increasingly isolated minority in swift decline. She left her homestead, Bowen's Court, for England as a young girl upon the divorce of her parents. She retained her ancestral home for most of her life, returning, notes Hermione Lee, "to Ireland . . . not exactly as an absentee, but certainly as a part-timer" (14).

The action of "The Demon Lover" revolves around Mrs. Drover, a woman in her forties, returning to her abandoned house to retrieve some personal articles during the German Blitz of London. Upon her return to her house she finds a mysterious letter from her former fiancé, missing in action and presumed dead since the First World War. The letter tells her of his impending return to reclaim his possession of her after a twenty-five year absence. In the letter, the estranged fiancé informs Mrs. Drover that "nothing has changed, and I shall rely upon you to keep your promise" (347). It is a promise Mrs. Drover now has neither the desire nor the ability to fulfill. Mrs. Drover becomes frightened and disconcerted by the prospect of reuniting with him. She recalls the following:

As she tries to recapitulate her time with him, she is unable to remember his face. She then realizes that the promise she made as a young girl has caused the intervening years to belong to her lost fiancé despite her subsequent marriage, family and quiet middle class life. At this point, it becomes clear to her that her life has been a setup for which she was doomed to fail. In the end, she encounters him in her one attempt to flee her fate. Ultimately, he controls the means of her flight, a taxi, and we are left with the impression that Mrs. Drover is being carried off to a tortuous damnation at his hands, never to emerge safe from his vengeance.

Bowen's story has many interpretive avenues, from the straightforward to, as offered by some, the numbingly obtuse. "The Demon Lover" strikes the reader immediately by the serenity, lifelessness and lack of emotion present in what is otherwise a Victorian horror story. Here we will find no descriptions of ancient ruins, natural decay, moisture, and passionate longing that one might expect to find in a story of this type. In fact, desire, except ultimately for that of survival, is wholly void from Mrs. Drover's experience. To the extent that passion exists in this tale, it is the rage of the former fiancé that looms just beyond the confines of the story's hushed setting. The fiancé’s rage at Mrs. Drover's lack of compliance to his impossible demands not so much drives, as it haunts, the existence of Mrs. Drover. Startled by the story's brevity, we are made curious by Mrs. Drover's lingering passivity and the lost soldier's ability to control Mrs. Drover, as he does, for such a long time without benefit of any discernible emotional bond. In fact, it is the case that Mrs. Drover's name is the combining of "lover" and "driver," foreshadowing the means of her demise, ironically striking us that nothing in the story is "driven by love."

This story is reminiscent of the emotional landscape most perfectly crystallized in Ezra Pound's "The Garden":

For Bowen a similarly modern, alienated urban world exists: it is one that paradoxically refuses to be moved by the war, yet, in the end, becomes its passive victim.

Pound's "end of breeding" gives spark to a more lively interpretation. As a child of a fallen Ascendancy, Bowen renders a character who is a ideal reflection of the author's ambivalence and idyllic remembrances of a childhood in Ireland. Like Mrs. Drover's bomb pocked London home, Bowen's Ireland is an exiled place still remaining to be visited but not in which to reside. Mrs. Drover's home is a place of quiet dignity, even when damaged by war. Lee describes Bowen's childhood life in segregated Ireland as follows: "Among families like her own who seemed to exist comfortably on unquestioned rules. No-one was shy, or vulgar, or Catholic. . . . Her first view of London, 'street after street of triste anonymity,' confirmed her sense of Dublin's grandeur and exclusiveness" (13).

Although the twenty-five year absence of the lost soldier is said in the story to have begun with his departure for the Great War in 1916, back dating twenty-five years previous to the publishing of the story in 1947, takes us to 1922 and the bloody emergence of the Irish Republic and the end of Protestant rule. The fiancé with the face not recallable is not so much a symbolic representation of the specter of the European experience of war, as he is Bowen's loss of a homeland of privilege and her ambivalence towards to the Catholics now in power and forever in possession of her birthright. The lost soldier, although the instrument of Drover's eternal undoing, is more tawdry than horrific.

When casting an evaluative eye on Bowen's piece, the most curious aspect of "The Demon Lover" is not the story itself. Instead, it is its position as a perennial of esteemed short story anthologies. At six pages, it is easy enough to add to any volume, and one must suspect the Bowen estate is more than accommodating to editors. Beyond the particularity of Anglo-Irish vision there is not a great deal to recommend this story to the pantheon of English-language short fiction.

The story itself is does not work well as a thriller or a suspense story. It is too brief to build suspense and it never is emotionally to flat to give the reader much of a sense of dread. Bowen never allows the reader to penetrate much below the protagonist's psychological surface to garner our sympathy. The antagonist is too oblique to give us very much concern of his motives. The need to show a prim world of dislocation and alienation works directly contrary to the telling of a cathartic ghost story. It is obvious that the author went to great pains to tell a spooky story with nary the slightest chthonic reference.

This is a story that seems to have a life of its own as fodder for literary examination and re-examination, reminding us of "Susan Sontag's famed definition of camp as 'failed seriousness"' which may predict the future place for much of the volumes of debate on this and other stories by Bowen (Pierpont 118). Some critics, such as Phyllis Lassner, have shown much of the commentary on Bowen's story are based on ever increasingly abstract moralism (162). But, as much of literary criticism becomes more and more isolated from everyday reality and afloat in a world of dowdy esoterica, perhaps this will give critics even more reason to identify with Mrs. Drover's fate. Otherwise they would be left to admit it is merely a well-crafted story without the benefit of timeless, universal truth.

"The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Drover is good, but not so good that it deserves perpetual import by literary scholars. The lack of strength of the story's impact dooms "The Demon Lover" ultimately not to be felt far beyond some members of an elite sensing their cultural privileges waning. It lends one to questions whether it is not only cultural pluralists who are guilty of placing socio-cultural consideration over "pure" artistic merit in choosing "great works," but also those same literary scholars who proclaim themselves as the guardians of "Western Canon." The inclusion of "The Demon Lover" in numerous literary anthologies nakedly demonstrates the hypocrisy of the indignant resistance from many scholarly quarters to calls for more cultural diversification in literary studies.

Bowen, Elizabeth. "The Demon Lover." The Oxford Book of Short Stories. Ed. V. S. Pritchet. New York. Oxford UP, 1981. 346-352.

Lassner, Phyllis. Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Lee, Hermione. Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation. London: Vision Press Limited, 1981.

McCormack, W. J. From Burke to Becket: Ascendancy Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History. Cork. Cork UP, 1994.

Stuff about lit reviews that I ended up NOT using in the chapter on how to write a lit research paper:

Professors of literature also read and sometimes publish a very similar type of paper in their academic journals: a review of a literary book, or a “literary review.” Unlike its name, a literary review does much more than merely “review”—or restate the plot and other elements—of a book. Rather, a good academic review is in many ways a shorter version of a literary research paper about just one or a few literary works. A good review, like a good research paper, offers both interpretation of a literary work and evaluation of its quality. It may do so in a shorter format, often with fewer quotations or paraphrases from other experts. Still, like a research paper, it offers a good reflection of the literary work under review and, from the writer of the review, one or more different, unique, helpful, or valuable ways to understand it.

Such reviews appear in even simpler form in public newspapers and magazines. Whether they are book, theater, film, or video reviews—or reviews of other art events such as dance, an exhibit by a painter, or a sculpture show—they use essentially the same critical reviewing skills you learn in writing a good literary research paper. Thus learning how to write such a paper is good practice not only for writing a public review, should you ever wish to do so, but also for reading such reviews—and, more importantly—for being able to talk about and share with others the content, meaning, and value of literary and other arts events. Writing literary research papers provides you with a lingua franca—a common language—for sharing your understanding of literature and the arts with others. For example, there is a great difference between being told, “The movie we saw last night was pretty cool; you have got to see it,” and an intelligent report of a few minutes to you about the basic elements of the movie and how you might tend see it from your own point of view. It takes someone not only bright but also, quite often, educated in a literature or similar course to be able to recommend a movie to you in this more intelligent way. Training in writing about literature gives you the language to tell others about what you’ve seen and felt, and to listen to others describe their insights. Such training also enables people to see a work of art more deeply and to share their perceptions and interpretations more easily with each other after sharing an art work.

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The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.