Literary Criticism Techniques

Tiago Cagliari

Introduction.?

We all can express our feelings or thoughts about something; these views can either be subjective, rooted in our ideas or opinions rather than facts; or objective, not influenced by personal sentiments or opinions, thus considering only facts. In this fashion, any person has and can express their opinions about a book (whether they loved it, hated it etc.), yet the competence to substantiate and assess a literary work and produce deep a conception about it, is reserved for critics who declaim their critique in Literary Criticism.??

This article explores Literary Criticism, what it is, what is its purpose, its approaches, its benefits to articulate and understand its techniques in the literary world.?

What is Literary Criticism??

Along with Literary Theory, the systematic analysis and study of literature under general principles, literary criticism is the academic study of the techniques used in the creation of literature, judging and explaining the importance and meaning of a book. Literary theory gives an ampler philosophical framework and analytic instruments in support of literary criticism. Consequently, theorists and critics are experts from different environments.?

Literary criticism, unlike theory, can be thought of as being our direct response to an author, a text or set of texts. Unlike literary theory, literary criticism is always explicitly directed towards literature. Criticism, then, is where we find the interpretation of literature. Theory, in contrast, is where we find the tools to facilitate that interpretation. (Literary Theory, A Complete Introduction.)?

The criticism here is not the act of expressing disapproval or opinions about the author’s faults, but the activity of making fair, careful judgements about the good and bad qualities of books and those who write them, facilitating the development of new interpretive directions.?

It is important, however, to differentiate Book Reviews from Literary Criticism. Book reviews, also referred to as ‘reader-response criticism’, offer a description and analysis of a new book, usually to recommend whether it’s a good read or not, whether it’s a good purchase or not. This review considers the genre and its innate elements, the structure and efficacy of the book, to decide and rank the quality, importance and success achieved by the author.??

Alternately, not only their works of literature, literary criticism studies the authors and their backgrounds, classifying these under pre-established attributes, interpreting and evaluating their composition and substance, such as genre, setting, plot, characters, style, theme and context. In literary criticism, the critic may also investigate the author's diction itself, rather than a single work.?

The purpose of literary criticism.?

The purpose of literary criticism is to broaden a reader’s understanding of an author’s work when critics summarise, interpret and explore its value. After giving the text a close reading, a critic formulates a comprehensive literary analysis that can inform or challenge another reader’s understanding of the text. The practice of literary criticism creates space for readers to better understand the beauty and complexity of the world through literature.?

The criticism will evaluate the language according to its usage. Pinker says that ‘like research, journalism, criticism, and other exercises of discernment, questions of usage, a writer must critically evaluate claims of correctness, discount the dubious ones, and make choices which inevitably trade off conflicting values.??

It’s inexorably true that the criticism of the past centuries was almost entirely sparked by personal judgment, and part of the critique’s campaign involved attacking others whilst advocating the critic’s viewpoint of what should or should not be the case during poetic and novelistic composition. It’s the offspring of the emotional subjectivity found during the aesthetic movement of the late 19th until mid-20th centuries. Although there’s not a minuscule whiff of consensus about the extent of subjectivism in the analysis of literature, the best proposal is restricting the evaluation under the shields of an objectivist perspective, for a judicious and reasonable verdict.??

As the linguist Ann Farmer, said: "It isn’t about being right. It’s about getting it right."

The responsibility of criticising a work is not to pinpoint errors or mistakes endowed with prejudices or personal opinions. It should also not be founded merely on people or the mere disagreement of opinions. The evaluation must flee from subjectivist analyses, and dive into objectivist reasoning. The reason must guide the critic.??

As Pinker teaches:??

Arguments should be based on reasons, not people. Saying that someone you disagree with is motivated by money, fame, politics, or laziness, or slinging around insults like simplistic, na?ve, or vulgar, does not prove that the things the person is saying are false. Nor is the point of disagreement or criticism to show that you are smarter or nobler than your target. Psychologists have shown that in any dispute both sides are convinced that they themselves are reasonable and upright and that their opposite numbers are mulish and dishonest. All of these principles lead us back to why we should care about style in the first place. There is no dichotomy between describing how people use language and prescribing how they might use it more effectively. We can share our advice on how to write well without treating the people in need of it with contempt. We can try to remedy shortcomings in writing without bemoaning the degeneration of the language. And we can remind ourselves of the reasons to strive for good style: to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world. (p. 339)?

The importance and Benefits of criticism of literary works.?

The receiver of the literary work is the reader, and to whom it belongs once it is published. The literary work doesn’t belong to its creators but only in a commercial and legal sense. There is a common understanding that their works belong to the public, for the work of literature wouldn’t exist without an audience to appreciate and appraise. The critic’s job is to refine literary works, hence the importance of literary criticism; and the readers also partake in the process of evaluation by the reader-response criticism, which has grand importance altogether.?

It serves as a source of recommendations. For example, like many other modernists during the early 20th century, Ezra Pound was anxious about the way that modern society produced a huge number of novels, books, plays, films and music, far too much for one person to assimilate, and most of it not worth bothering with: "His letters are full of reading lists and recommendations, and much of the criticism in the Literary Essays consists of arguments about which poets are worth reading, and which not." (The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry, p. 45.)?

On the other hand, literature is not self-explanatory. How effectively literature represents the material and immaterial world has been one of the main objects of argumentation between those supporting or condemning works and their authors. This controversy over the poetic truth, the creative imitation presenting an imaginative truth, became a modern, pendulous discussion from extraliterary to literary knowledge. How precise the representation an author can give of these worlds, is something literary critics should ascertain, they interpret the contours and facets and give their interpretation to the public.?

The critic’s duties are to the public, giving only their standards of judgment about the author’s work, not to appraise nor censure the author’s persona. In this exact point lies a delicate concern. A critic might dispirit an author when offering a severe critique, which can be unfairly pedantic in some respects and consequently obstruct the readers’ engagement with literature, deflecting attention toward inessential matters, hindering the author from persisting and advancing with their style or their career.?

Critics are responsible for the formation and transformation of literature, they analyse the history, they examine the background, the process of writing, the process of publication and the level of success. With the book in hand, they are not only evaluating a single source of information, but a whole culture that has been shaped with the tools given by their criticism.??

Practising and reading literary criticism gives us some tools. In the first place, literary criticism sets the parameters to help better understand literature, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction; the author’s motives and the book’s motifs, per instance. The tools to study the entire work, evaluate all its elements and interpret all the nuances it has, are found in critiques. "If you want to write a critical essay or book review about a particular piece of literature, reading other examples of literary criticism can help you learn how to frame your point of view." –MasterClass.?

Literary criticism also prepares the garden of literature to flourish new styles, to bloom new dictions. Only by parsing an established genre, only by fully understanding a work of literature, can the writer have space and context in new opportunities obtained, to grow and trespass the frontiers, to break the creative boundaries for new methods and ways to write literature.?

Likewise, through the careful inspection of works of literature, through different approaches to literary criticism, readers, writers and critics can widen the discernment of nature and the world outside. ‘Each literary style encourages the critic and reader to consider different perspectives from their own.’?

Another of the most important functions of literary criticism is the discovery and dissemination of new works. The essay or review of a literary work will broaden the worldview and the market, and bring attention to the novel. But still, publishers and literary critics have always been struggling to sunder sterling novels from the garden of literature, to garner them out to the spotlight.?Many best-sellers achieve this status years or even decades after its first publication.??

No different situation happened with the novel Don Quixote by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. When first published in 1605, it was slightly acclaimed in its original country, but only in 1612 did its translated version come to the English Channel and appear in London. After decades the novel gained the deserved attention, and today is one of the most-translated books in the world, labelled one of the best-selling novels of all time.??

The English author Lissa Oliver handwrote her first novel, Chantilly Dawns, in the early 1980s. Around 25 years later, the novel was accepted and published in 2011 in Kindle Edition by Amazon. It took years until it was finally recognised for its qualities, and now is an Award-winning Journalist. And seven years after its first publication, the novel hit number one on Amazon.?

Had the critics of those two novels been aware of the novel’s literary importance when they were first published, they would have been the greatest success since then, and Miguel de Cervantes and Lissa Oliver would have reaped the meritorious fruits of what they had sown.?

The last but no less important benefit is improvement, the analysis of a work, genre, style and so on, avails the correct recognition to catalogue any and all angles that might need to be hammered straight and reshaped for enhancement. The critique, therefore, helps the readership to better engage and challenge both the book and its author.?

Criticism techniques.?

There is no positivistic set of requisites or rules, but for the critics to produce their critique about a work of literature, there are criteria and principles that should be observed, so their decision obtained, with evidence, may judge the book with a fair and proper assessment. Typically, the body of a critique has a summary of the work under analysis, a careful examination of its arguments and the conclusion providing the evaluation.?

Each criterion may be examined separately eyeing the standards and principles by which literature is judged. The first principle is Language, as the system of communication used for writing. The critic knows the language used by the author in their diction, which obeys the general conventions of usage and grammatical rules.??

Steven Pinker wrote in The Sense of Style (p. 77):??

Knowing a bit of grammar also gives a writer an entrée into the world of letters. Just as cooks, musicians, and ballplayers have to master some lingo to be able to share their tips and learn from others, so writers can benefit by knowing the names of the materials they work with and how they do their jobs. Literary analysis, poetics, rhetoric, criticism, logic, linguistics, cognitive science, and practical advice on style need to refer to things like predicates and subordinate clauses, and knowing what these terms mean will allow a writer to take advantage of the hard-won knowledge of others.??

The knowledge the writer has to compose their work is no more nor less than the knowledge of their critics. Only by knowing all the nuances of language and literature can the writer write and the critic criticise the work.??

The genre in which the author’s work falls has a great influence on how the critic will analyse it. The category that qualifies literature is then called genre, which arises from stylistic criteria that can establish which literary genre the book is considered according to literary conventions. These stylistic elements are the kind of theme, setting, mode, tone, form and so on, allocated between fiction and nonfiction types. What will determine which literary genre the book fits, is its strong similarities with other works of literature, which thus has formed a literary genre.?

Per instance, horror is a fictional plot that conveys and evokes senses and sentiments of dread and terror; gothic fiction has a dark setting involving romance and supernatural forces with strong emotional response; crime stories narrate a plot where a crime, mostly a murder, is committed and the mystery involving its investigation and the detection of clues that leads to its perpetrator; fantasy has magical and mythical beings; science fiction explores advanced technology and distant worlds.?

Every genre has its primordial elements, and the author considers these elements to elaborate the story in the same way the critic will analyse the presence, quality and efficiency of these elements. only considering the presence of the primal facets all the literary genres have, can the critic delve into the wide variety of approaches.??

Approaches to literary criticism.?

Literary theory guides through different channels to study literary works, which follow some distinct paths set in distinct approaches, each with their separate methods to analyse literature. Here you will find some of them.?

Biographical and historical.?

The two first approaches are the biographical and historical. The biographical criticism uses the perspective of the author’s context and life, but not the setting into which the plot is created or the social environment in which the author lived. The critic assesses the significance of a book when connected to a personal approach, related to its author's life, and details these connections between the life and the book.??

This approach will then travel beyond the assertion that literary criticism is confined to the intrinsic and formal flavours of a literary work, to spread the assessment to the observation of the background in which the work was created, assessing whether the author’s life is related to the book or not, whether there are similarities between author and characters, and whether the author’s personal experiences influenced or are part of narration or plot.?

An example of works that can be analysed in this approach is ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce, published serially in The Egoist in 1914–15 and in book form in 1916. The novel paints the details of Joyce's early life, capturing his journey from childhood into adulthood, narrating internal conflicts, family matters and religion. Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist, is seen as Joyce's fictional double. The author had already even published novels with the pseudonym ‘Stephen Daedalus’. Thus, the analysis of the novel helps to understand James Joyce’s upbringing and personal formation, the inspiration for the novel and the motifs for the plot.?

Biographical criticism is sometimes confounded and studied along with New Historicism, the historical criticism which examines the historical and cultural context, in time and space, in which the book was written, analysing the political, economic, social and religious conditions of the time that influenced the author. In this way, it deals in close detail with specific periods, and these are certainly valuable resources for a focused historical understanding of literature. "When read in context, though, it can be seen that the early novels and early literary criticism were addressing, responding to and even shaping the historic events of their day." (English Literature in Context, p. 190.)?

The novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens is set during the Victorian Era, the period of technological and religious revolution that influenced social and political issues; it is consummately addressed in the book as the themes of the great disparity of wealth between the ruling and the labouring classes.??

Sociological.?

In modern literary criticism, critics no longer assess only the biographical contexts of the work, nor either (obviously) the historical view, but also on different approaches that literary theory offers, because:?

It allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of literature, but also about the core themes that a text might explore – concepts such as gender, sexuality, the self, race and class. (Literary Theory, A Complete Introduction)?

Sociological criticism seeks to understand the social context. Inside this approach, the critic examines the status of both the author and the society, including the effect that the book has on its readers. The sociological approach has a wide field of analysis in the satirical allegorical novella ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell. The plot tells the story of the revolution of the oppressed, farm animals against their human subjugators, for equality issues under power and control, mirroring the authoritarian socialist states such as the Soviet Union.??

Formalistic and practical.?

The formalistic approach appreciates style under a classic and formal magnifier. They parse the author’s artistic merit, examining their technical skills and the formal characteristics of their language and diction, such as wording and syntactic choices and the use of figures of rhetoric. Books explored in this approach rest in the highest standards of literature, which are determined by strict and formalist critics. William Shakespeare, one of the greatest authors of all time, is constantly criticised for using the formalistic approach.?

Last century, in Britain and the United States, there have been developments in reading, which in practice would be called practical criticism, and later new criticism. In conjunction with the formalistic approach, both schools had a profound influence on how we read literary texts, minding the textual detail in form, not only in the subject. The concern was centred on quality, which was later transformed into the contemporary idea of the literary canon.??

Psychoanalytic criticism.?

Psychoanalytic criticism adjudges the work according to the psychological perspectives of the characters or their creators. It employs the terms of psychoanalysis, such as the unconscious, repression, the Oedipus complex, etc., to illuminate aspects of literature in its connection with conflicting psychological states. Many critics believe that psychoanalytic critics can perfectly be applied to all literary works, for they believe that an author’s unconscious thoughts are expressed through their work, being authors aware or not that internal affairs are impacting their writing. The question of what makes us who we are, and how our selfhood is constructed, is the main concern of this approach, the dominant school of psychoanalysis developed by the Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).??

Moral-philosophical and Reader-response criticism.?

Other approaches include moral-philosophical criticism, grounded on the work’s ethical merits and the natural sense of correctness, rather than formal principles. Ethics can be defined as the moral principles that guide behaviour or conduct, so, in the context of literary theory, ethics means considering how literature might shape these moral principles. (Literary Theory, A Complete Introduction.)?

And reader-response criticism, also called reception theory, is the book review mentioned above, for it considers the reader's reaction to or interpretation of a book as a necessary origin of critical study, and as a form of feedback. It was during the 70s and 1980s that the changes in reading literature were taking another shape; it’s now been considered how literature affects the readership. Readers become part of the meaning of the text. Critics and authors saw that the ‘ideal reader’ may not matter or not exist, simply because there are different readers, which makes the book a dynamic and mutable entity. Under this angle, readers themselves find their meaning, their interpretation influenced only by their bias and predilections rather than principles and conventions. This compels authors to study their audience, to find their taste, and to write words that will quench their thirst.??

Other forms of analysis.?

Following the approaches to literary criticism, the steps for analyses of a literary work the critic takes are comparison, evaluation and exegesis. The comparison will discern, contrast and list the similarities the book has with others previously published by the same author, as well as other books from the same genre; the evaluation establishes the book’s literary relevance; and the exegesis will interpret the reasons and meanings of the various themes and perspectives the book has.?

The process of analysis will explore the characterization, decipher the characters' personalities and the way they grow along the story, the main traits which are unique and interesting, what they may implicitly or explicitly represent, and their impact on the plot. The setting is the time and place in which a story unfolds. The critic will assess the choice and the importance of the setting and how it influences the plot, which, in turn, holds the keys to the conflict and climax of the main story.?

Other aspects to consider are the author’s reason for choosing the genre, the plot and the characters; the reason the author opted for a specific setting; the reason for the themes sailed during the evolution of the plot; the methods presented for characterization and personage’s development and transformation; the efficiency to picture how the characters impact the plot and whether it’s connected to the themes or not.??

Two of the principal aspects in literature, the critic will evaluate the format and style, whether the author succeeded or not in producing a narrative within the principles and standards allocated for the literary genre in which the book fits. For this purpose, all the attributes are weighted and compared to literary formulas and conventions.??

Criticism is also a great source for controversies capable of waging war between authors, poets and critics of literature. For example, the Cantos is a collection of poems by the modernist poet Ezra Pound, which included Chinese characters and quotations from several European languages, with references to historical events and sudden alternations with little or no transition. Hence the work was generally deemed difficult to read to the public and caused controversies for its political views. In the same way, criticism helps to form tendencies and influence the evolution and advancement of Literature and poetry.?

Present examples of literary criticism.?

The BBC Culture's picks of the best fiction of the year 2024 is an example of how literary criticism works:?

"A sensational state-of-the-nation novel with a cast of dozens" is how the Irish Independent describes Caledonian Road, Andrew O'Hagan's most ambitious novel yet. Having won the Christopher Isherwood prize for Mayflies, and been nominated for the Booker, the Scottish author has now written a sweeping, London-set, satirical novel that has been compared to the social novels of both Dickens and Tom Wolfe. It tells the story of 52-year-old Scot Campbell Flynn, a celebrity writer and academic, as he encounters an ensemble cast of characters, from minor royals and Russian oligarchs to human traffickers and grime artists. It is an "addictively enjoyable yarn," says The Guardian, "with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider's grasp on the nuances of high culture… a book simultaneously dazzled and disgusted by the city it depicts". (Lindsay Baker)?

In Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation that she was expected to turn down, and finds herself on a chaotic hen weekend in Prague, hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. As the group of women converge to celebrate, each of their versions of the past come together too, and we are reminded that all stories can have many different perspectives. The novel abandons conventional narrative, turning into several stories within the story, and becoming unexpected in many ways for both the reader and the characters on the page. "The bold, lucid, and experimental latest from Oyeyemi portrays Prague as a city of dreams and mysteries," says Publishers Weekly. Another Magazine, meanwhile, praises Parasol Against the Axe's originality: "Oyeyemi's vision is vast and enigmatic, carried by sentences so crisp and lithe, this is like nothing you’ve ever read before."?

"A strangely uplifting, exquisitely droll heartbreaker of a book," writes The New York Times of Choice, the latest novel from the author of the Booker-shortlisted The Lives of Others. Beginning with the story of Ayush, an editorial director at a London publishing house, Choice is divided into three distinct but interconnected narratives that cross the globe, together exploring ethical dilemmas and the notion of free will through the contemporary concerns of climate change and global poverty. Choice is "a brilliant, bleak, moral maze of a novel" writes The Guardian, which offers no easy answers.?

"This Dickensian yarn of a celebrity writer heading for a fall combines the bling of an airport bestseller with an insider’s grasp on high culture." These are the words of The Guardian’s critics on Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. The novel is a biting portrait of British class, politics and money told through five interconnected families and their rising and declining fortunes. They say:?

"The city itself is the star of all great London novels, and plays whatever role is required by the tale or the times. It was a semi-sentient organism in Dickens’s Bleak House, wrapped in fog and thick with mud. It was rancorous and gone to seed in Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square; gauche and adventurous in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids cast it as a city of the blind, prowled by carnivorous walking plants. That probably remains fictional London’s lowest ebb. But at times, for dark stretches, Andrew O’Hagan’s seventh novel runs it close."

This is an example of the comparative method of analysis, bringing the essence of the analysed work out of the pages and contrasting them with Dickens’s Bleak House, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.?

The debut novel Green Dot by Madeleine Gray follows the snarky but self-aware 24-year-old Hera as she attempts to find connection and meaning in her life, taking a job on a news website, and soon falling for an older married journalist, Arthur. It has been widely praised, and compared favourably with the likes of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss. The Irish Times observes that "despite the arch and exuberant writing style, there is a bleak undercurrent to the book". iNews describes it as "a brilliantly bawdy novel… a Fleabag-style debut [that is] actually worth the hype".?

Wild Houses is the first novel by short story writer Colin Barrett, is set in a small town in Ireland and tells the story of a sweet-natured teenage boy, Doll, who is kidnapped by a local gang and taken as collateral for his elder brother's crimes. The Telegraph critics say it’s "a superb Irish tale of violence, loyalty and loss." The Washington Post calls it "an electric thriller", with masterful touches of comedy, as "tense moments suddenly burst with flashes of absurdity or comic exasperation." Here they analysed the author’s tone and mood of the narrative.?

Praising the novel's authentic feel, the Post adds: "Barrett's dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you'll be wiping their spittle off your face… The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings – not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl." This is the sociological approach, for it dissects the novel to understand how the author’s diction painted the social context with the use of slang in the dialogues.?

It’s important to recall that though reviews may sometimes envisage whether a given book will be widely sold or not, many works succeed commercially despite negative reviews, as did many classic works (like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, 1851), they have acquired appreciative publics long after being unfavourably reviewed and at first neglected (Britannica). Again, book reviews are subjective and made by any reader, the complete analysis of a word of literature is objective and made by experts, the critics.?

State of Paradise by Laura Van Den Berg is a book tells the story of a ghostwriter who, along with her husband, returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. The Washington post describes the book: "The supernatural, or the suggestion of it, coats her tales like so much humidity ... A macabre tale in which the living interact with the dead and yet the eeriest souls are those with a pulse." It says also that the book is not without fantastical detours, but much of it feels real enough.??

The Boston Globe wrote: "Both a work of speculative fiction and a pandemic novel ... Weird and eerie ... Bottomlessly beguiling." And The New York Times: "Discomfiting and surreal ... Van den Berg rejects the very concept of narrative cohesion, plunging the reader instead into a series of dreamscapes. Moody and hallucinatory ... Reflect[s] our selves back at us and into the world, in all their wildness and weirdness."

The plot unrolls as the protagonist wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern―something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.?

Conclusion.?

Learning how to read literature is the first step on how to analyse, understand and write literature.??

Literature is not always self-explanatory, which requires the critique to never be of a superficial understanding of the book; a summary only represents the surface. The analysis should dive deeper into the pages with a thorough read to find the links of the author’s intentions, pinpointing the key themes of the book and reading between all the lines to detect implied and explicit passages.?

Whilst literary theory sets the formal ideas intended to explain why and how literature happens and exists, literary criticism uses these principles and theoretical ideas of literary composition to practically analyse the creation and form of literature. In a broader sense, literary criticism is the reasoned contemplation of literary works, applying the argumentation on general literature, an author or specific works as a judgment of quality.??

Inside any proficient type of writing, notwithstanding a novel being directed to a general lay readership, the diction, the style, the figures of rhetoric, the tone and mood will only be evaluated by the members of a literate literary community with knowledge and formed opinions on literature that will produce the proper and suitable analysis and interpretation.??

The holder of literature is the receiver, the readership; and thus they enact an important role that chisels the wondrous contours of literature. Critics might refine literature by evaluating books and authors and giving recommendations, but the reader-response criticism will accept or not these recommendations.?

Literary criticism broadens the readership’s understanding of the novel, it will summarise, interpret and explore its elements to uncover its value. This process helps a reader to better engage with the book and to challenge its author. It deepens the understanding of the literary tools and all characteristics surrounding the text; it contributes to literature’s development over time in cultural production.??

Bibliographic references.?

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle. Third Edition, 2004. Pearson Longman.?

Literary Theory, A Complete Introduction by Sara Upstone, 2017 by Teach Yourself Publisher.?

English Literature in Context. Second Edition, 2017. Ed. By Paul Poplawski. Cambridge University Press.?

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry. Peter Howarth. 2012. Cambridge University Press.?

Literary Theory and Criticism, an Oxford Guide, 2006. Edited by Patricia Waugh. Oxford University Press.?

Britannica. Literary Criticism by Frederick Crews. Sep 6, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/art/literary-criticism.?

Britannica. The Afterlife of Miguel de Cervantes by J E Luebering. https://www.britannica.com/story/cervantes-after-400-years.?

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, 2014. Steven Pinker. Viking.?

MasterClass. Literary Criticism Explained. Jul 15, 2021. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/literary-criticism.?

Oxford reference. Psychoanalytic criticism. https://www.oxfordreference.com.?

BBC Culture. The best fiction of the year 2024 by Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker. 5 June 2024. https://www.bbc.com/culture.?

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review/2024/02/10/green-dot-by-madeleine-gray-promising-debut-novel-about-the-adrift-twentysomething-life.?

https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/green-dot-madeleine-gray-review-fleabag-2854845