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6.4: Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism

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Introduction

A very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these ideas act as different lenses critics use to view and talk about art, literature, and even culture. These different lenses allow critics to consider works of art based on certain assumptions within that school of theory. The different lenses also allow critics to focus on particular aspects of a work they consider important.

For example, if a critic is working with certain Marxist theories, s/he might focus on how the characters in a story interact based on their economic situation. If a critic is working with post-colonial theories, s/he might consider the same story but look at how characters from colonial powers (Britain, France, and even America) treat characters from, say, Africa or the Caribbean. Hopefully, after reading through and working with the resources in this area of the OWL, literary theory will become a little easier to understand and use.

Please note that the schools of literary criticism and their explanations included here are by no means the only ways of distinguishing these separate areas of theory. Indeed, many critics use tools from two or more schools in their work. Some would define differently or greatly expand the (very) general statements given here. Our explanations are meant only as starting places for your own investigation into literary theory. We encourage you to use the list of scholars and works provided for each school to further your understanding of these theories.

We also recommend the following secondary sources for study of literary theory:

• The Critical Tradition: Classical Texts and Contemporary Trends , 1998, edited by David H. Richter
• Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide , 1999, by Lois Tyson
• Beginning Theory , 2002, by Peter Barry

Although philosophers, critics, educators and authors have been writing about writing since ancient times, contemporary schools of literary theory have cohered from these discussions and now influence how scholars look at and write about literature. The following sections overview these movements in critical theory. Though the timeline below roughly follows a chronological order, we have placed some schools closer together because they are so closely aligned.

Timeline (most of these overlap)

• Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
• Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s-present)
• Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism(1930s-present)
• Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)
• Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)
• Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present)
• Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present)
• New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present)
• Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)
• Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
• Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present)
• Critical Race Theory (1970s-present)
• Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism. Authored by : Allen Brizee, J. Case Tompkins, Libby Chernouski, Elizabeth Boyle. Located at : https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/01/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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literary criticism , the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature , whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato ’s cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often taken as the earliest important example of literary criticism .

More strictly construed, the term covers only what has been called “practical criticism,” the interpretation of meaning and the judgment of quality. Criticism in this narrow sense can be distinguished not only from aesthetics (the philosophy of artistic value) but also from other matters that may concern the student of literature: biographical questions, bibliography , historical knowledge, sources and influences, and problems of method. Thus, especially in academic studies, “criticism” is often considered to be separate from “scholarship.” In practice, however, this distinction often proves artificial, and even the most single-minded concentration on a text may be informed by outside knowledge, while many notable works of criticism combine discussion of texts with broad arguments about the nature of literature and the principles of assessing it.

Criticism will here be taken to cover all phases of literary understanding, though the emphasis will be on the evaluation of literary works and of their authors’ places in literary history. For another particular aspect of literary criticism, see textual criticism .

The functions of literary criticism vary widely, ranging from the reviewing of books as they are published to systematic theoretical discussion. Though reviews may sometimes determine whether a given book will be widely sold, many works succeed commercially despite negative reviews, and many classic works, including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), have acquired appreciative publics long after being unfavourably reviewed and at first neglected. One of criticism’s principal functions is to express the shifts in sensibility that make such revaluations possible. The minimal condition for such a new appraisal is, of course, that the original text survive. The literary critic is sometimes cast in the role of scholarly detective, unearthing, authenticating, and editing unknown manuscripts. Thus, even rarefied scholarly skills may be put to criticism’s most elementary use, the bringing of literary works to a public’s attention.

The variety of criticism’s functions is reflected in the range of publications in which it appears. Criticism in the daily press rarely displays sustained acts of analysis and may sometimes do little more than summarize a publisher’s claims for a book’s interest. Weekly and biweekly magazines serve to introduce new books but are often more discriminating in their judgments, and some of these magazines, such as The (London) Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books , are far from indulgent toward popular works. Sustained criticism can also be found in monthlies and quarterlies with a broad circulation, in “little magazines” for specialized audiences, and in scholarly journals and books.

Because critics often try to be lawgivers, declaring which works deserve respect and presuming to say what they are “really” about, criticism is a perennial target of resentment. Misguided or malicious critics can discourage an author who has been feeling his way toward a new mode that offends received taste. Pedantic critics can obstruct a serious engagement with literature by deflecting attention toward inessential matters. As the French philosopher-critic Jean-Paul Sartre observed, the critic may announce that French thought is a perpetual colloquy between Pascal and Montaigne not in order to make those thinkers more alive but to make thinkers of his own time more dead. Criticism can antagonize authors even when it performs its function well. Authors who regard literature as needing no advocates or investigators are less than grateful when told that their works possess unintended meaning or are imitative or incomplete.

What such authors may tend to forget is that their works, once published, belong to them only in a legal sense. The true owner of their works is the public, which will appropriate them for its own concerns regardless of the critic. The critic’s responsibility is not to the author’s self-esteem but to the public and to his own standards of judgment, which are usually more exacting than the public’s. Justification for his role rests on the premise that literary works are not in fact self-explanatory. A critic is socially useful to the extent that society wants, and receives, a fuller understanding of literature than it could have achieved without him. In filling this appetite, the critic whets it further, helping to create a public that cares about artistic quality. Without sensing the presence of such a public, an author may either prostitute his talent or squander it in sterile acts of defiance. In this sense, the critic is not a parasite but, potentially, someone who is responsible in part for the existence of good writing in his own time and afterward.

Although some critics believe that literature should be discussed in isolation from other matters, criticism usually seems to be openly or covertly involved with social and political debate. Since literature itself is often partisan, is always rooted to some degree in local circumstances, and has a way of calling forth affirmations of ultimate values, it is not surprising that the finest critics have never paid much attention to the alleged boundaries between criticism and other types of discourse. Especially in modern Europe, literary criticism has occupied a central place in debate about cultural and political issues. Sartre’s own What Is Literature? (1947) is typical in its wide-ranging attempt to prescribe the literary intellectual’s ideal relation to the development of his society and to literature as a manifestation of human freedom. Similarly, some prominent American critics, including Alfred Kazin , Lionel Trilling , Kenneth Burke , Philip Rahv , and Irving Howe , began as political radicals in the 1930s and sharpened their concern for literature on the dilemmas and disillusionments of that era. Trilling’s influential The Liberal Imagination (1950) is simultaneously a collection of literary essays and an attempt to reconcile the claims of politics and art.

Such a reconciliation is bound to be tentative and problematic if the critic believes, as Trilling does, that literature possesses an independent value and a deeper faithfulness to reality than is contained in any political formula. In Marxist states, however, literature has usually been considered a means to social ends and, therefore, criticism has been cast in forthrightly partisan terms. Dialectical materialism does not necessarily turn the critic into a mere guardian of party doctrine, but it does forbid him to treat literature as a cause in itself, apart from the working class’s needs as interpreted by the party. Where this utilitarian view prevails, the function of criticism is taken to be continuous with that of the state itself, namely, furtherance of the social revolution. The critic’s main obligation is not to his texts but rather to the masses of people whose consciousness must be advanced in the designated direction. In periods of severe orthodoxy, the practice of literary criticism has not always been distinguishable from that of censorship.

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Theory vs. criticism.

From: Stevens, Anne H.  Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction . Second edition., Broadview Press, 2021.

"In general, literary theory refers to writings that deal with the underlying principles associated with the study of literature, language, interpretation, culture, and all sorts of related issues. Many of the thinkers who have shaped major theoretical approaches to literature come from areas outside the boundaries of traditional literary studies, especially in fields such as philosophy and the social sciences. Literary criticism usually refers to analysis of a particular work or works: studies of individual authors, genres, literary movements, and the like.

The two terms are closely related, however, since both literary theorists and literary critics study literary texts using a theoretical framework. One way of conceiving of the difference between the two relates to the underlying aims of the writing. A work of literary theory might use literary texts as examples or illustrations that serve to develop a larger theoretical point, while a literary critic might use a theoretical perspective as a means of better understanding a literary text. The distinction is quite subtle and subjective, though, because these two sides -- theory and criticism -- constantly reinforce each other."

Bibliographies

• Oxford Bibliographies: Literary and Critical Theory Scholarly, annotated summaries and listings of the significant sources in Literary and Critical Theory.

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To find additional dictionaries and encyclopedias, searched by subject headings:

• Criticism -- Terminology
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• Criticism -- Bio-bibliography
• Literature -- Terminology

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Using this page

This section of the guide will help with your critical analyses of literary works. Whether by helping you define literary terms and concepts, or by helping you find and explore critical approaches to literature, we hope the resources and tools in this section enhance your critical thinking and research skills.

Literary Criticism vs. Reviews vs. Literature Reviews

• Literary Criticism
• Literature Reviews

Description

Rather than rating the quality of an author's work as a whole, literary criticism, or critical analysis, typically focuses on how an author treats a topic or topics. Through interpretation, summarizing, or comparing the work to others, the critic's purpose (in most cases) is to increase the reader's understanding of the literary work.

There are quite a few types or schools of literary criticism/analysis. Here are 11 traditional approaches:

• HIstorical-biographical criticism - examines a work through the perspective of an author's historical context.
• Moral-philosophical criticism - evaluates a work based on the moral statements and judgements expressed by characters and the author within the text.
• Sociological criticism - examines the author’s status in their society as well as the effect that the literary work had on its audience within the society (Marxist criticism falls into this category).
• Psychoanalytic criticism - examines literature based on the psychological desires and neuroses of the characters within a particular piece of literature. Psychoanalytic critics believe that an author’s unconscious thoughts are expressed through their work.
• Practical criticism - encourages readers to examine the text without regard to any outside context.
• Formalism - encourages readers to judge the artistic merit of literature by examining its formal elements, like language and technical skill.
• Reader-response criticism - believes that a reader's reaction to or interpretation of a text is as valuable a source of critical study as the text itself.
• New criticism - focuses on examining the formal and structural elements of literature, as opposed to the emotional or moral elements.
• Post-structuralism - questions any assumed universal truths as reliant on the social structure that influenced them.
• Deconstruction - picks apart a text’s ideas or arguments, looking for contradictions that render any singular reading of a text impossible.
• Feminist criticism - as it's name suggests, examines literature through a feminist lens.

(Descriptions taken from MasterClass, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/literary-criticism).

Why is literary criticism useful?

As mentioned above, literary criticism can enhance your understanding of a work. In order to write your own critical essay, it can be very useful to find examples of other criticism that will help inform your position or perspective.

The many approaches to critical analysis provide a wide variety of ways to examine literary works, expanding your appreciation and understanding of literature in general.

How can I find literary criticism?

Critical essays are usually found in scholarly journals, and many such journals can be explored from the Databases & Journals page in this guide. Here are some additional approaches to finding literary criticism:

Literature Resource Center provides biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 160,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world. Literature Resource Center content supports interdisciplinary approaches to the humanities, information literacy, and the development of critical thinking skills. In addition, Literary Resource Center is cross-searchable with other Gale literary products like LitFinder and eBooks from Gale.

• SuperSearch Using the Advanced Search mode in SuperSearch, you can enter your author, work, or topic in the first field, and combine it with "Subject contains 'criticism'" to narrow the results.

For example, here is a search for "edgar allen poe" that also looks for "criticism" in the Subjects. Another approach is to expand the Subjects filter when viewing a list of results, then look for the subject terms "literary criticism," "criticism and interpretation," or "history and criticism" (see screenshot below). Select those checkboxes and click Apply Filters to further narrow your results.

Among the forms discussed on this page, reviews are likely the format you're most familiar with. Reviews are usually relatively short pieces that provide a qualitative assessment of a work (think "5-star review"). Often, reviewers also offer a recommendation (e.g., worth reading; if you like X, you'll like this, etc.) and express personal opinions (e.g., "I felt the author could have..." or 'I was surprised to find...'). Unlike critical analyses, which focus on a specific theme or topic within the work, reviews typically examine the work as a whole.

You are probably most familiar with book reviews, but there can also evaluative reviews written on scholarly articles.

Why are reviews useful?

Because they are usually written by experts in the same field as the work being evaluated, reviews can be incredibly useful during the research process. In addition to providing a summary of the work, reviews can identify factual inaccuracies, structural issues, whether the work adds to the field of research or simply repeats territory that has already been covered, and identify potential author bias.

You may be able to identify some of these things yourself, but getting the reviewer's perspective can be quite helpful in determining whether you want to use the book or article as a source for your own research.

How do I find reviews?

Reviews can sometimes be tricky to identify, but SuperSearch does provide a method you can use. After searching for your work, author, or topic, look for "Reviews" in the Material Type filter on the left side of the screen:

A literature review, also called a review article or review of literature, surveys the existing research on a topic. The term "literature" in this context refers to published research or scholarship in a particular discipline, rather than "fiction" (like American Literature) or an individual work of literature. In general, literature reviews are more common in the sciences and social sciences, but they are written occasionally in the humanities.

Literature reviews may be written as standalone works, or as part of a scholarly article or research paper. In either case, the purpose of the review is to summarize and synthesize the key scholarly work that has already been done on the topic at hand. The literature review may also include some analysis and interpretation. A literature review is not a summary of every piece of scholarly research on a topic.

Why are literature reviews useful?

Literature reviews can be very helpful for newer researchers or those unfamiliar with a field by synthesizing the existing research on a given topic, providing the reader with connections and relationships among previous scholarship. Reviews can also be useful to veteran researchers by identifying potentials gaps in the research or steering future research questions toward unexplored areas. If a literature review is part of a scholarly article, it should include an explanation of how the current article adds to the conversation.

How do I find literature reviews?

Reviews of literature are published in scholarly journals. In SuperSearch and most databases, select the Advanced Search mode and include "literature review" or "review of the literature" in addition to your other search terms. In the search results, some articles may include the phrase "systematic review," "review of literature," or "literature review" in the title or subtitle.

The library also subscribes to Annual Reviews, a database of publications dedicated to literature reviews in a variety of disciplines.

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What is literary criticism?

Dickinson College Waidner-Spahr Library  

Literary criticism can be found most often in critical books and scholarly articles. Critical books provide in-depth, scholarly, expert analysis of your topic. Scholarly articles also provide expert analysis, and are usually peer-reviewed, a process by which articles are reviewed by other scholars in the same field of study before being published. Peer review is an important step in the scholarly publishing process. To learn more about peer review, watch the video below. 

What is peer review?

Video transcript

Find Literary Criticism

Find literary criticism in both books and journals using the resources below. A complete list of literary criticism databases can be found on the UH Libraries website . 

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Module 10: Working with Literature

Approaches to literary criticism, learning objectives.

Describe key methodological approaches in the field of literary criticism

One useful way to think about the different approaches or schools of literary criticism is to regard them as different methodologies. An earlier chapter in this textbook (Section 1.3: Fields of Inquiry) talked about the different methodologies employed by different academic disciplines. We defined a methodology there as a “a system of methods that an academic discipline uses to carry out its research and pursue the answers to its questions, combined with an overarching philosophical attitude and interpretive framework for applying those methods.” That’s a good guide to understanding the nature of the different literary critical theories/methodologies. There’s a whole host of different interpretive methodologies for approaching works of literature. You’ll learn more about these in the next section. Collectively, these individual methodologies or theories add up, more or less, to the larger realm of literary theory as a whole.

Schools of Literary Criticism

To put meat on these bones, here are brief descriptions of some of the most prominent schools of literary criticism. (Bear in mind that this is hardly a comprehensive list!) When you research the available scholarly writings on a given work of literature, you may come across essays and articles that use one or more of these approaches. We’ve grouped them into four categories—author-focused, text-focused, reader-focused, and context-focused—each with its own central approach and central question about literary works and effective ways to understand them.

Author-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding their authors?

Biographical criticism focuses on the author’s life. It tries to gain a better understanding of the literary work by understanding the person who wrote it. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What aspects of the author’s life are relevant to understanding the work?
• How are the author’s personal beliefs encoded into the work?
• Does the work reflect the writer’s personal experiences and concerns? How or how not?

Psychological criticism applies psychological theories, especially Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian archetypal depth psychology, to works of literature to explore the psychological issues embedded in them. It may analyze a story’s characters or plot, a poet’s use of language and imagery, the author’s motivations for writing, or any other aspect of a literary work from a psychological perspective. It can be classified as an author-focused approach because its emphasis is on reading the work as an expression of the author’s unconscious processes, such that one can analyze and interpret the work in the same way a psychoanalyst would do with a patient’s dream. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• What psychological forces and factors are involved in the words, behaviors, thoughts, and motivations of the characters in a story?
• Do dreams or psychological disorders play a part in the work?
• How did the author’s life experiences affect his or her intellectual and emotional formation? How is this psychological impact evident in the text and/or the author’s act of writing it?
• What unintended meanings might the author have embedded or encoded in the work?

Text-Focused: How can we understand literary works in terms of themselves?

Formalism , along with one of its more conspicuous modern iterations, New Criticism , focuses on a literary text itself, aside from questions about its author or the historical and cultural contexts of its creation. Formalism takes a story, poem, or play “on its own terms,” so to speak, viewing it as a self-contained unit of meaning. The formalist critic therefore tries to understand that meaning by paying attention to the specific form of the text. New Criticism was a particular kind of Formalism that arose in the mid-twentieth century and enjoyed great influence for a time. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the structure of the work reveal its meaning?
• How do the form and content of the work illuminate each other? What recurring patterns are there in the form, and what is their effect?
• How does use of imagery, language, and various literary devices establish the work’s meaning?
• How do the characters (if any) evolve over the course of the narrative, and how does this interact with the other literary elements?

Reader-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the subjective experience of reading them?

Reader-response criticism emphasizes the reader as much as the text. It seeks to understand how a given reader comes together with a given literary work to produce a unique reading. This school of criticism rests on the assumption that literary works don’t contain or embody a stable, fixed meaning but can have many meanings—in fact, as many meanings as there are readers, since each reader will engage with the text differently. In the words of literature scholar Lois Tyson, “reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature.” Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• Who is the reader? Also, who is the implied reader (the one “posited” by the text)?
• What kinds of memories, knowledge, and thoughts does the text evoke from the reader?
• How exactly does the interaction between the reader and the text create meaning on both the text side and the reader side? How does this meaning change from person to person, or if the same person rereads it?

Context-Focused: How can we understand literary works by understanding the contextual circumstances—historical, societal, cultural, political, economic—out of which they emerged?

Historical criticism focuses on the historical and social circumstances that surrounded the writing of a text. It may examine biographical facts about the author’s life (which can therefore connect this approach with biographical criticism) as well as the influence of social, political, national, and international events. It may also consider the influence of other literary works. New Historicism, a particular type of historical criticism, focuses not so much on the role of historical facts and events as on the ways these things are remembered and interpreted, and the way this interpreted historical memory contributes to the interpretation of literature. Typical questions involved in historical criticism include the following:

• How (and how accurately) does the work reflect the historical period in which it was written?
• What specific historical events influenced the author?
• How important is the work’s historical context to understanding it?
• How does the work represent an interpretation of its time and culture? (New Historicism)

Feminist criticism focuses on prevailing societal beliefs about women in an attempt to expose the oppression of women on various levels by patriarchal systems both contemporary and historical. It also explores the marginalization of women in the realm of literature itself. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the work portray the lives of women?
• How are female characters portrayed? How are the relationships between men and women portrayed? Does this reinforce sexual and gender stereotypes or challenge them?
• How does the specific language of a literary work reflect gender or sexual stereotypes?

Post-colonial criticism focuses on the impact of European colonial powers on literature. It seeks to understand how European hegemonic political, economic, religious, and other types of power have shaped the portrayals of the relationship and status differentials between Europeans and colonized peoples in literature written both by the colonizers and the colonized. Typical questions involved in this approach include the following:

• How does the text’s worldview, as evinced in plot, language, characterization, and so on, grow out of assumptions based on colonial oppression?
• Which groups of people are portrayed as strangers, outsiders, foreign, exotic, “others”? How are they treated in the narrative?
• How does the work portray the psychology and interiority of both colonizers and colonized?
• How does the text affirm (either actively or by silence) or challenge colonialist ideology?

Critical race theory focuses on systemic racism and interrogates the dynamics of race and race relationships. In origin, it is a specifically American school of critical theory that sees White racism as an everyday fact of life in America, visible throughout all aspects of culture and society. As such, it encompasses all aspects of life, including literature. Its purpose is to expose and overturn the factors that enable systemic racism to exist. As a literary critical approach, its typical questions include the following:

• What is the significance of race, either explicit or implicit, in the literary work being examined?
• Does the work include or exclude the voices and experiences of racism’s victims?
• How does the work either affirm/reinforce (whether actively or by silence) or challenge/subvert systemic racism?

The following video presents a helpful introduction to the different schools of literary theory and criticism as methodologies:

Useful Metaphors: Literary Critical Methods as Toolboxes and Lenses

Two useful metaphors for understanding what literary critical theories do and how they’re intended to work are the metaphor of the toolbox and the metaphor of the lens .

The toolbox is the older metaphor. It was more popular before the turn of the twenty-first century, and it says that each critical/theoretical approach provides a set of tools, in the form of specialized concepts and vocabulary, for thinking and talking meaningfully about literature. As this metaphor would have it, once you’ve learned the right concepts and terminology, you’re better equipped with the tools to think and talk about literature in a rich and deep way.

Beginning roughly around the turn of the century, the lens began to supplant the toolbox as the preferred metaphor. Tyson explains it well: “Think of each theory as a new pair of eyeglasses through which certain elements of our world are brought into focus while others . . . fade into the background.” In other words, the lens metaphor characterizes each critical/theoretical approach as a different way of seeing the text, with the different lenses rendering different aspects of the text more prominent or less prominent, more visible or less visible, resulting in the possibility of substantially and even fundamentally different overall readings of the same text depending on which lens is used.

For example, consider the case of Homer’s Iliad as it might appear through several of the different lenses described above.

• Biographical criticism would highlight the influence of Homer himself—his biographical facts and major life experiences—on the text.
• Psychological criticism would highlight the inner psychological lives of the characters and the psychological meanings and significance of the Iliad’s language, settings, gods, heroes, themes, and so on, reading Homer’s epic poem in psychoanalytic terms as a kind of symbolic dreamworld.
• Reader-response criticism would consider the relationship between the individual reader and the text. Since the Iliad is more than two thousand years old, one possible reader-response approach (but only one among any) might be to consider how the modern reader’s experience and understanding of this work harmonizes or clashes with the implied/intended reader of a poem that was written down in vastly different cultural circumstances some 2,800 years ago, and that was composed even earlier than that.
• Historical criticism would try to understand the Iliad by understanding the historical, cultural, and literary contexts out of which it emerged in ancient Greece, and of which it is at least partly a reflection.
• Feminist criticism would highlight the roles and portrayals of women in a work largely dominated by men—such as Brisies, the Trojan priestess of Apollo, who becomes a contested “possession” in a conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon—and perhaps seek to recover these feminine perspectives from beneath their subjugation under the overriding masculine one.

It’s also important to recognize that not all literary works are equally amenable to being examined through all critical/theoretical lenses. When it comes to the Iliad, for example, post-colonial critics have found relatively little to “work with” and respond to. However, it’s a different story with Homer’s Odyssey, where the post-colonial lens has produced readings of the text that highlight Odysseus’ role as a colonizer, even as the same lens has also produced readings that highlight  Odysseus’ role as a wretched refugee. (Greenwood)

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2006, p. 170.

Greenwood, Emily. Postcolonial Perceptions of Homeric Epic. The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corinne Ondine Pache, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 532-535.

• Methodology: An Introduction to Literary Theory. Authored by : The Nature of Writing. Provided by : The Nature of Writing. Located at : https://youtu.be/hXLm3zZYhc0 . License : All Rights Reserved
• Approaches to Literary Criticism. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

• MJC Library & Learning Center
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Researching Writers and Their Work

• Literary Criticism Basics

What is Literary Criticism?

Why is this so challenging, we have you covered.

• Know Your Sources
• Find Books, Articles, & Videos
• Find Web Sites
• Need More Help?

When you are searching for information that helps you analyze, interpret, and evaluate works of literature -- novels, poems, stories, plays, etc. -- you are seeking a source of information called literary criticism .

Despite its rather negative-sounding name, literary "criticism" is not necessarily negative!  Literary criticism is simply an in-depth critique of an author's work that helps a researcher understand the work's meaning, symbolism and/or origin.

Need more information on literary criticism and writing about literature?   Check out these useful titles!

Many research projects assigned at MJC require students to explore current events and controversial issues.   These issues-–things like health care reform, climate change, or obesity--affect most of us and play some role in our lives or the lives of those close to us.   Chances are if someone brings up health care reform or global warming you have an opinion on it. So researching issues like these require us to find outside resources to expand, challenge and reinforce ideas we already have.

When an instructor assigns you to read and write about a literary work, however, you must often start from scratch.   The literary work itself may very well be new to you, and if you don’t have experience writing about literature it is very easy to become intimidated. What exactly is the difference between a plot and a theme?   What does the phrase “historical context” mean? How in the world do I identify the symbolism in this poem? These problems have long plagued student researchers, which is why the MJC Library has plenty of sources to make your research progress as smoothly as possible.

The MJC Library has a lot of great resources to help you as you journey into the world of literary criticism. Using the books, articles and Web pages in this guide you can easily find things like:

• author biographies
• plot summaries
• character descriptions
• thematic overviews
• historical, political, and social contexts
• reviews and criticism of specific works, authors and literary genres
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• Getting Started
• Finding Books and Articles
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• Finding and Using Reference Sources
• Working Smarter

What's a good topic?

Choosing a topic can be one of the hardest parts of writing a paper. There are so many possible things to write about, and even if you have a general idea, it can be hard to know whether your topic is a good one. 

Writing a literature paper is different from writing many other kinds of papers. In literary analysis, it's not the ideas of other people that matter as much as your own interpretation of the texts you're reading. The bulk of your paper will be made up of your analysis of the text: the use of language, imagery, rhythm and repetition, word choice, the structure of the plot, or the representations of characters, emotions, events, or places. Your job is to analyze these elements of the text and through your analysis to assert an idea, or a claim, about the text, the author, or the context in which the text was written.

So what makes a good topic? A good topic is a theme that you think is represented in the text you're reading. But how do you get from a good topic to a good research question? 

What's a good research question?

Once you recognize a theme in a text or texts, your next step is to determine what you think the texts are saying about that theme. Read the text again, paying particular attention to your theme. What does your interpretation lead you think about the theme or idea? This is your claim, and your paper is structured around using analysis of the text or texts to support your claim. 

For example, you may be interested in looking at community or society in Thoreau's "Walden." You may have read the text and noticed a contradiction between Thoreau's claims of self-reliance and his interaction with society. You would then re-read the text, asking yourself as you read "What is the representation of society and Thoreau's relationship to it in 'Walden'?" After reading the text closely and paying special attention to these aspects of "Walden," you may be ready to make the claim that while Thoreau believed he was self-reliant, in truth he was still part of a network of people, and still part of his society and community. Or you may discover that your initial thought was wrong, and that Thoreau really did separate himself from his community in the way he wrote about. 

Types of Sources

There are a lot of different kinds of sources that you can use in your analysis. This guide will show you how to find and use these by type. 

Primary Sources  are the main pieces of evidence you will use to make your claim. The texts you are reading are a primary source; they are the most important primary source you're working with. Other examples are newspaper and magazine articles, diaries and letters, photographs, maps, and reviews written or created at the same time as your text. These sources can help you put your subject into context. 

Reference Sources  give you a broad overview of a person, place, event, or idea. They provide commonly known facts. Reference sources are not cited in your paper, but can be very useful for grounding you in your subject and ensuring that you have solid background information.  Literary biographies   are a form of reference material, and give you lots of information about authors, with an emphasis on how their lives are related to their writing. 

Secondary Sources  are also sometimes referred to as  criticism.  These are books and articles that scholars have written about a particular work of literature, movement, or author. Criticism can help you get a sense of the themes that other scholars read in a particular text. They may help inform your own understanding of a text, either because they reinforce your interpretation, or differ from it. Criticism is usually published in books or as articles in scholarly journals. 

So how do I use sources?

Primary sources are the evidence that we use to support our claims. They aren't the articles that other scholars and researchers have written, but original source material that we can use to better understand our topic. Primary sources in literary research include the text or texts that you're analyzing, but might also include additional material like letters written by the author, photographs, reviews written when the text was published, newspapers articles. Many different kinds of things can be used as primary sources, depending on your subject. 

For example, if you're studying Thoreau's relationships with others, you may want to find out more about Thoreau's role in his community by reading primary source material (letters that he wrote to friends and colleagues, newspaper articles about him or about his community) or by reading more about the context of his life in Massachusetts (the political and artistic movements of which he was part, the actual location of his cabin in relation to the town of Concord). These additional sources are used to support your interpretation of the text you're analyzing. 

You may want to use secondary sources to discuss other scholars' ideas and interpretations of the topic and text you're writing about, especially if you don't agree with their interpretations. Pay especially close attention to aspects of your topic that scholars don't agree about, and to different interpretations or ideas about a text. If there are major debates about the authors or texts you're studying, you'll want to reference them in the paper to help inform your reader and provide context to your own interpretation. 

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Table of Contents

Collaboration, information literacy, writing process, literary criticism.

• © 2023 by Angela Eward-Mangione - Hillsborough Community College
• Some of the people in the group say they do not like the film because it portrays Bella as a weak female who becomes obsessed with Edward Cullen whom she cannot marry without leaving her loving father and losing her precious mortality.
• Other people like those aspects of the film, however, arguing that the film makes them disagree with its representation of some women as meek characters.

What is Literary Criticism?

Literary Criticism is

• a research method , a type of textual research , that literary critics employ to interpret texts and debate interpretations
• a genre of argument about a specific text or a set of texts .

Key Terms: Archive, Canon ; Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Semiotics ; Text & Intertextuality ; Tone ; rhetoric , intersubjectivity, modernism, postmodernism.

*Alternative Article Title(s): Critical Theory

General Strategies for Engaging in Literary Criticism

Engage in rhetorical analysis.

The methods for engaging in rhetorical criticism and presenting interpretations are bounded by the values and customs of particular disciplinary communities–i.e., the conventions of particular critical schools (e.g., Critical Disability Studies or Feminist Criticism ).

Distinguish between summarizing the literary work and presenting your argument. Many students fall into the trap of spending too much time summarizing the literature being analyzed as opposed to critiquing it. As a result, it would be wise to check with your teacher regarding how much plot summary is expected. As you approach this project, remember to keep your eye on the ball: What, exactly (in one sentence) is the gist of your interpretation?

Development

One of the most strategic things you can do if you’ve assigned to write some criticism is to read other critics who are well regarded by the disciplinary community you choose to address.

How do other critics evaluate an author’s work? What literary theories do literary critics use to interpret texts or particular moments in history? Reading sample analysis papers can help you find and adopt an appropriate voice and persona. By reading samples, you can learn how others have prioritized particular criteria.

Cite Other Critics’ Interpretations of the Work

Criticism written by advanced English majors, graduate students, and literary critics may be more about what other critics have said than about the actual text. Indeed, many critics spend more time reading criticism and arguing about critical approaches than actually reading original works. However, unless you are enrolled in a literary theory course, your instructor probably wants you to focus more on interpreting the work than discussing other critical interpretations. This does not mean, however, that you should write about a literary work “blindly.” Instead, you are wise to find out what other students and critics have said about the work.

Below is a sample passage that illustrates how other critics’ works can inspire an author and guide him or her in constructing a counter argument, support an author’s interpretation, and provide helpful biographical information.

In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” was published in the June 28, 1948 issue of the New Yorker it received a response that “no New Yorker story had ever received”: hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by “bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse.”1 It is not hard to account for this response: Jackson’s story portrays an “average” New England village with “average” citizens engaged in a deadly rite, the annual selection of a sacrificial victim by means of a public lottery, and does so quite deviously: not until well along in the story do we suspect that the “winner” will be stoned to death by the rest of the villagers.

[ Scholarship as a Conversation ]

Organization

The format for literary critiques is fairly standard:

• State your claim(s).
• Forecast your organization.
• Marshal evidence for your claim.
• Reiterate argument and elaborate on its significance.

In English classes, you may be able to assume that your readers are familiar with the work you are critiquing. Perhaps, for example, the entire class is responding to one particular work after some class discussions about it. However, if your instructor asks you to address a broader audience, you may need to provide bibliographical information for the work. In other words, you may need to cite the title, publisher, date, and pages of the work (see Citing Sources ).

Literary critiques are arguments. As such, your instructors expect you to state a claim in your introduction and then provide quotes and paraphrased statements from the text to serve as evidence for your claim. Ideally, your critique will be insightful and interesting. You’ll want to come up with an interpretation that isn’t immediately obvious. Below are some examples of “thesis statements” or “claims” from literary critiques:

• In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist is oppressed and represents the effect of the oppression of women in society. This effect is created by the use of complex symbols such as the house, the window, and the wall-paper which facilitate her oppression as well as her self expression. [“‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’: A Twist on Conventional Symbols” by Liselle Sant]
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman is a sad story of the repression that women face in the days of the late 1800’s as well as being representative of the turmoil that women face today. [Critique of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Brandi Mahon]
• “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story of a woman, her psychological difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment of her aliments during the late 1800s. . . Gilman does well throughout the story to show with descriptive phrases just how easily and effectively the man “seemingly” wields his “maleness” to control the woman. But, with further interpretation and insight I believe Gilman succeeds in nothing more than showing the weakness of women, of the day, as active persons in their own as well as society’s decision making processes instead of the strength of men as women dominating machines. “The View from the Inside” by Timothy J. Decker
• In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain creates a strong opposition between the freedom of Huck and Jim’s life on the raft drifting down the Mississippi River, which represents “nature,” and the confining and restrictive life on the shore, which represents “society.” [ “‘All I wanted was a change’: Positive Images of Nature and Society in Chapter 19 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from Professor Matthew Hurt’s “Sample Essays for English 103: Introduction to Fiction”]
• In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” an unexpected visitor comes down from the sky, and seems to test the faith of a community. The villagers have a difficult time figuring out just how the very old man with enormous wings fits into their lives. Because this character does not agree with their conception of what an angel should look like, they try to determine if the aged man could actually be an angel. In trying to prove the origin of their visitor, the villagers lose faith in the possibility of him being an angel because he does not adhere to their ordered world. Marquez keeps the identity of the very old man with enormous wings ambiguous to critique the villagers and, more generally, organized religion for having a lack of faith to believe in miracles that do not comply with their master narrative. [“Prove It: A Critique of the Villagers’ Faith in ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings'” from Sample Essays for English 103: Introduction to Fiction, Professor Matthew Hurt]

Literary criticism is a fairly specialized genre . Instead of writing to a general lay audience, you are writing to members of a literary community who have read a work and who developed opinions about the work–as well as a vocabulary of interpretation.

Across Schools of Criticism, critics share a common vocabulary of critique. Below are some common words used by literary critics.

• Protagonist: The protagonist is the major character of the story; typically the character must overcome significant challenges.
• Antagonist: The protagonist’s chief nemesis; in other words, the character whom the protagonist must overcome.
• Symbols: Metaphoric language; see A Catalogue of Symbols in The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• Viewpoint: Stories are told either in the first person or third person point of view. The first person is limited to a single character, although dialog can let you guess at other characters’ intentions. The third person allows readers inside the character’s mind so you know what the character feels and thinks.Viewpoint can be “limited,” where the character knows less than the reader, or “omniscient,” where the reader can hear the thoughts and feelings of all characters. Occasionally writers will use multiple character viewpoint, which takes you from one character’s perspective to another.
• Plot: Plots are a series of scenes, typically moving from a conflict situation to a resolution. To surprise readers, authors will foreshadow “false plants,” which lead readers to anticipate other resolutions. The term “denouement” refers to the unraveling of the plot in the conclusion.

Cite from the Work

Literary criticism involves close reading of a literary work, regardless of whether you are arguing about a particular interpretation, comparing stories or poems, or using a theory to interpret literature. The purpose of the document is not to inform the readers, but to argue a particular interpretation. You only need to cite parts of the work that support or relate to your argument and follow the citation format required by your instructor

What are Schools of Literary Criticism?

Literary theory and criticism have existed from classical through contemporary times. Over time, schools of criticism have evolved as critics (aka communities of practitioners) have introduced new ideas about texts and intertextuality , rhetoric , intersubjectivity, modernism, postmodernism.

Schools of Literary Criticism include

Critical Disability Studies

Feminist criticism, lgbtq + criticism, marxist criticism, new historicist criticism, post-colonial criticism, post-structuralist, deconstructive criticism, psychological criticism, reader-response criticism, russian formalism and new criticism, structuralist criticism.

Most schools of literary criticism draw extensively on the work of other theorists and critics, while others concentrate on the reader’s thoughts and feelings. Additionally, some theorists analyze a work from an historical perspective, while others focus solely on a close reading of a text.

The first step in formulating a critical argument is to assume a rhetorical stance that engages a type, school, or approach of literary criticism. The critical approach you employ to engage in textual analysis will shape the content of your interpretation.

[ Rhetorical Stance | Rhetorical Reasoning ]

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• Angela Eward-Mangione

Marxist Criticism refers to a method you’ll encounter in literary and cultural analysis. It breaks down texts and societal structures using foundational concepts like class, alienation, base, and superstructure. By...

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Literary Criticism Research

Would you like to write a good paper for your literature class?

The first step is to read the literary work you are analyzing. Your thoughts and reactions as a reader will be key to your paper.

The next step is to find outside information that will help you understand the work. This information can help you make sense of the literature you are reading, and contribute to a more informed analysis.

This guide highlights useful outside information sources for students writing literary criticism.

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• Harvard Library
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Literary Research in Harvard Libraries

• Distant Reading, Close Reading
• Get Organized
• Find Background
• Where to Search
• Search Vocabulary
• Obscure/Recent Topics
• Literary Journalism Search (under construction!)
• Find Primary or Archival Material
• Literary Theory
• Foreign Language Literatures

Distant Reading

About distant reading.

"Distant reading" has a specific meaning (coined by Franco Moretti), but can also generally refer to the use of computational methods to analyze literary texts. To learn more, start with Debates in the Digital Humanities , or explore this HOLLIS search for scholarly guides to the Digital Humanities and this MLA search for "distant reading" and related terms .

Ngram Viewers: Chart word usage over time

Beware: ngram counts are only as relevant or interesting as the corpus of texts they're measuring. Is the spike or drop you're observing attributable to a change in how language is used, or just material circumstances that make something likely to be included or excluded from your corpus? Think about the long-term durability of various kinds of paper, library collection policies, wartime effects on publishing, etc.

• Google Ngram: choose a sample of the Google Books corpus, including the "Google million." Search up to 5 consecutive words. Visit About Google Ngram for details and advanced features.
• HathiTrust Bookworm : samples the HathiTrust Digital Library. Unigrams (single words) only. More precise options for specifying type of publication. Select a plot point to see a snapshot of texts with "hits."
• Mediacloud : lots of options for visualizing topics in the news. Requires creating a free account.

Databases and Datasets

• HarvardKey-restricted : the library licenses access to many kinds of databases that provide data , searchable full-text corpora , and other kinds of tools.
• Free to access : the web abounds in open-access portals that encourage you to explore texts on a macro scale. Some big ones include the Digital Public Library of America , HathiTrust and its HathiTrust Research Center , Europeana , and the Internet Archive . There are many, many more.
• Specialized datasets , such as the ECCO corpus, may be available by request
• For details and specific recommendations , ask me!
• For additional leads and ideas , see library research guides that mention data

Build Your Own Project: Campus Resources

• Digital Scholarship Group
• Lamont Media Lab
• Harvard Map Collection
• Institute for Quantitative Social Science

Close Reading

About close reading.

Close reading is an activity that keeps you focused on and within a text—appraising individual words, shapes of thought, rhetorical devices, patterns of description and characterization, and so forth, in order to understand the text's artistic achievement. For more on the history and practice, see the JHU Guide's article on Practical Criticism or this HOLLIS search for "close reading" and literary criticism .

Trace Word Meanings over Time

• The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) : widely accepted as the most complete record of the English language ever assembled. Each entry includes a pronunciation key and etymology (in Old or Middle English, for example), identifies a word's earliest known use, and lists the word's changing meanings (including those now obsolete). Quotations from literary texts and other historical records illustrate different usages over time. The OED has a  fascinating history of its own .

Trace Occurrences of a Word across Texts

• Concordances : These are published, alphabetized lists of individual words used in a single text (e.g.Thoreau's  Walden  ) or larger oeuvre (e.g.  Ezra Pound's  Cantos  or  Milton's English prose ). In HOLLIS, add "concordances" to the author's name, e.g. concordances AND "Keats, John" . Many concordances are now published online instead: examples include the  Victorian  Literary Studies Archive Hyper-Concordance , the  Open Source Shakespeare Concordance ,  and the  Online Concordance to  Wallace Stevens' Poetry .
• Searchable full-text   collections : When a concordance isn't available, there may be digital editions of the literary text(s) you're studying. For English and American authors, try  LION (Literature Online) : it contains a library of 350,000 texts from the 8th century through the 20th. For more, see our guide to Finding Full Text Books Online .
• Variorum editions : Some texts exist in multiple versions. The differences between these versions, from the removal or addition of whole passages to subtle changes in punctuation, can make enormous differences in interpretation. A variorum edition collates textual variants and attempts to account for them, in some cases, by including the critical conversations they have engendered. A HOLLIS search for an author's name plus "variorum" or "variants" ( "Shakespeare, William" AND (variorum OR variants) will bring up variorum editions as well as literary criticism that focuses specifically on textual variants. 

Understand Literary and Rhetorical Terms

These special terms provide literary scholars with a shorthand for describing the formal properties of language, but they can also give you new lenses with which to view texts. The word "chiasmus" is shorter than "repetition of ideas in reverse order"; the concept of chiasmus might make you more alert to the order in which ideas are repeated within a sentence or a paragraph.

• The Reference Works collection in Literature Online is an excellent selection of searchable guides specific to literary studies. Pro tip : you can use the general search box and then filter your results to "Reference."
• Silva Rhetoricae : An award-winning website, maintained at Brigham Young University, that provides overviews of rhetorical practice, definitions of rhetorical figures, and very helpful examples of each.
• Individual guides and dictionaries: a HOLLIS search for dictionaries of poetics and literary terminology is a good way to see what's out there. For a helpful selection, start at call number RR 3005.31 in the Loker Reading Room.
• << Previous: Foreign Language Literatures

Except where otherwise noted, this work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which allows anyone to share and adapt our material as long as proper attribution is given. For details and exceptions, see the Harvard Library Copyright Policy ©2021 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.

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• Knowledge Base

Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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The Big List of Essay Topics for High School (120+ Ideas!)

Ideas to inspire every young writer!

High school students generally do a lot of writing, learning to use language clearly, concisely, and persuasively. When it’s time to choose an essay topic, though, it’s easy to come up blank. If that’s the case, check out this huge round-up of essay topics for high school. You’ll find choices for every subject and writing style.

• Argumentative Essay Topics
• Cause-and-Effect Essay Topics
• Compare-Contrast Essay Topics
• Descriptive Essay Topics
• Expository and Informative Essay Topics
• Humorous Essay Topics

Literary Essay Topics

• Narrative and Personal Essay Topics
• Personal Essay Topics
• Persuasive Essay Topics

Research Essay Topics

Argumentative essay topics for high school.

When writing an argumentative essay, remember to do the research and lay out the facts clearly. Your goal is not necessarily to persuade someone to agree with you, but to encourage your reader to accept your point of view as valid. Here are some possible argumentative topics to try. ( Here are 100 more compelling argumentative essay topics. )

• The most important challenge our country is currently facing is … (e.g., immigration, gun control, economy)
• The government should provide free internet access for every citizen.
• All drugs should be legalized, regulated, and taxed.
• Vaping is less harmful than smoking tobacco.
• The best country in the world is …
• Parents should be punished for their minor children’s crimes.
• Should all students have the ability to attend college for free?
• Should physical education be part of the standard high school curriculum?

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• Schools should require recommended vaccines for all students, with very limited exceptions.
• Is it acceptable to use animals for experiments and research?
• Does social media do more harm than good?
• Capital punishment does/does not deter crime.
• What one class should all high schools students be required to take and pass in order to graduate?
• Do we really learn anything from history, or does it just repeat itself over and over?
• Are men and women treated equally?

Cause-and-Effect Essay Topics for High School

A cause-and-effect essay is a type of argumentative essay. Your goal is to show how one specific thing directly influences another specific thing. You’ll likely need to do some research to make your point. Here are some ideas for cause-and-effect essays. ( Get a big list of 100 cause-and-effect essay topics here. )

• Humans are causing accelerated climate change.
• Fast-food restaurants have made human health worse over the decades.
• What caused World War II? (Choose any conflict for this one.)
• Describe the effects social media has on young adults.

• How does playing sports affect people?
• What are the effects of loving to read?
• Being an only/oldest/youngest/middle child makes you …
• What effect does violence in movies or video games have on kids?
• Traveling to new places opens people’s minds to new ideas.
• Racism is caused by …

Compare-Contrast Essay Topics for High School

As the name indicates, in compare-and-contrast essays, writers show the similarities and differences between two things. They combine descriptive writing with analysis, making connections and showing dissimilarities. The following ideas work well for compare-contrast essays. ( Find 80+ compare-contrast essay topics for all ages here. )

• Public and private schools
• Capitalism vs. communism
• Monarchy or democracy
• Dogs vs. cats as pets

• Paper books or e-books
• Two political candidates in a current race
• Going to college vs. starting work full-time
• Working your way through college as you go or taking out student loans
• iPhone or Android
• Instagram vs. Twitter (or choose any other two social media platforms)

Descriptive Essay Topics for High School

Bring on the adjectives! Descriptive writing is all about creating a rich picture for the reader. Take readers on a journey to far-off places, help them understand an experience, or introduce them to a new person. Remember: Show, don’t tell. These topics make excellent descriptive essays.

• Who is the funniest person you know?
• What is your happiest memory?
• Tell about the most inspirational person in your life.
• Write about your favorite place.
• When you were little, what was your favorite thing to do?
• Choose a piece of art or music and explain how it makes you feel.
• What is your earliest memory?

• What’s the best/worst vacation you’ve ever taken?
• Describe your favorite pet.
• What is the most important item in the world to you?
• Give a tour of your bedroom (or another favorite room in your home).
• Describe yourself to someone who has never met you.
• Lay out your perfect day from start to finish.
• Explain what it’s like to move to a new town or start a new school.
• Tell what it would be like to live on the moon.

Expository and Informative Essay Topics for High School

Expository essays set out clear explanations of a particular topic. You might be defining a word or phrase or explaining how something works. Expository or informative essays are based on facts, and while you might explore different points of view, you won’t necessarily say which one is “better” or “right.” Remember: Expository essays educate the reader. Here are some expository and informative essay topics to explore. ( See 70+ expository and informative essay topics here. )

• What makes a good leader?
• Explain why a given school subject (math, history, science, etc.) is important for students to learn.
• What is the “glass ceiling” and how does it affect society?
• Describe how the internet changed the world.
• What does it mean to be a good teacher?

• Explain how we could colonize the moon or another planet.
• Discuss why mental health is just as important as physical health.
• Describe a healthy lifestyle for a teenager.
• Choose an American president and explain how their time in office affected the country.
• What does “financial responsibility” mean?

Humorous Essay Topics for High School

Humorous essays can take on any form, like narrative, persuasive, or expository. You might employ sarcasm or satire, or simply tell a story about a funny person or event. Even though these essay topics are lighthearted, they still take some skill to tackle well. Give these ideas a try.

• What would happen if cats (or any other animal) ruled the world?
• What do newborn babies wish their parents knew?
• Explain the best ways to be annoying on social media.
• Invent a wacky new sport, explain the rules, and describe a game or match.

• Imagine a discussion between two historic figures from very different times, like Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth I.
• Retell a familiar story in tweets or other social media posts.
• Describe present-day Earth from an alien’s point of view.
• Choose a fictional character and explain why they should be the next president.
• Describe a day when kids are in charge of everything, at school and at home.

Literary essays analyze a piece of writing, like a book or a play. In high school, students usually write literary essays about the works they study in class. These literary essay topic ideas focus on books students often read in high school, but many of them can be tweaked to fit other works as well.

• Discuss the portrayal of women in Shakespeare’s Othello .
• Explore the symbolism used in The Scarlet Letter .
• Explain the importance of dreams in Of Mice and Men .
• Compare and contrast the romantic relationships in Pride and Prejudice .

• Dissect the allegory of Animal Farm and its relation to contemporary events.
• Interpret the author’s take on society and class structure in The Great Gatsby .
• Explore the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia.
• Discuss whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of young love in Romeo and Juliet is accurate.
• Explain the imagery used in Beowulf .

Narrative and Personal Essay Topics for High School

Think of a narrative essay like telling a story. Use some of the same techniques that you would for a descriptive essay, but be sure you have a beginning, middle, and end. A narrative essay doesn’t necessarily need to be personal, but they often are. Take inspiration from these narrative and personal essay topics.

• Describe a performance or sporting event you took part in.
• Explain the process of cooking and eating your favorite meal.
• Write about meeting your best friend for the first time and how your relationship developed.
• Tell about learning to ride a bike or drive a car.
• Describe a time in your life when you’ve been scared.

• Share the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you.
• Tell about a time when you overcame a big challenge.
• Tell the story of how you learned an important life lesson.
• Describe a time when you or someone you know experienced prejudice or oppression.
• Explain a family tradition, how it developed, and its importance today.
• What is your favorite holiday? How does your family celebrate it?
• Retell a familiar story from the point of view of a different character.
• Describe a time when you had to make a difficult decision.
• Tell about your proudest moment.

Persuasive Essay Topics for High School

Persuasive essays are similar to argumentative , but they rely less on facts and more on emotion to sway the reader. It’s important to know your audience, so you can anticipate any counterarguments they might make and try to overcome them. Try these topics to persuade someone to come around to your point of view. ( Discover 60 more intriguing persuasive essay topics here. )

• Do you think homework should be required, optional, or not given at all?
• Everyone should be vegetarian or vegan.
• What animal makes the best pet?
• Visit an animal shelter, choose an animal that needs a home, and write an essay persuading someone to adopt that animal.
• Who is the world’s best athlete, present or past?
• Should little kids be allowed to play competitive sports?
• Are professional athletes/musicians/actors overpaid?
• The best music genre is …

• Is democracy the best form of government?
• Is capitalism the best form of economy?
• Students should/should not be able to use their phones during the school day.
• Should schools have dress codes?
• If I could change one school rule, it would be …
• Is year-round school a good idea?

A research essay is a classic high school assignment. These papers require deep research into primary source documents, with lots of supporting facts and evidence that’s properly cited. Research essays can be in any of the styles shown above. Here are some possible topics, across a variety of subjects.

• Which country’s style of government is best for the people who live there?
• Choose a country and analyze its development from founding to present day.
• Describe the causes and effects of a specific war.
• Formulate an ideal economic plan for our country.
• What scientific discovery has had the biggest impact on life today?

• Analyze the way mental health is viewed and treated in this country.
• Explore the ways systemic racism impacts people in all walks of life.
• Defend the importance of teaching music and the arts in public schools.
• Choose one animal from the endangered species list, and propose a realistic plan to protect it.

What are some of your favorite essay topics for high school? Come share your prompts on the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook .

Plus, check out the ultimate guide to student writing contests .

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100 Thought-Provoking Argumentative Writing Prompts for Kids and Teens

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The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value

If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI) , 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey  on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year , with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla , Alexander Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Michael Chui , with Bryce Hall , representing views from QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and McKinsey Digital.

Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value.

AI adoption surges

Interest in generative AI has also brightened the spotlight on a broader set of AI capabilities. For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI. 1 Organizations based in Central and South America are the exception, with 58 percent of respondents working for organizations based in Central and South America reporting AI adoption. Looking by industry, the biggest increase in adoption can be found in professional services. 2 Includes respondents working for organizations focused on human resources, legal services, management consulting, market research, R&D, tax preparation, and training.

Also, responses suggest that companies are now using AI in more parts of the business. Half of respondents say their organizations have adopted AI in two or more business functions, up from less than a third of respondents in 2023 (Exhibit 2).

Gen AI adoption is most common in the functions where it can create the most value

Most respondents now report that their organizations—and they as individuals—are using gen AI. Sixty-five percent of respondents say their organizations are regularly using gen AI in at least one business function, up from one-third last year. The average organization using gen AI is doing so in two functions, most often in marketing and sales and in product and service development—two functions in which previous research  determined that gen AI adoption could generate the most value 3 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. —as well as in IT (Exhibit 3). The biggest increase from 2023 is found in marketing and sales, where reported adoption has more than doubled. Yet across functions, only two use cases, both within marketing and sales, are reported by 15 percent or more of respondents.

Gen AI also is weaving its way into respondents’ personal lives. Compared with 2023, respondents are much more likely to be using gen AI at work and even more likely to be using gen AI both at work and in their personal lives (Exhibit 4). The survey finds upticks in gen AI use across all regions, with the largest increases in Asia–Pacific and Greater China. Respondents at the highest seniority levels, meanwhile, show larger jumps in the use of gen Al tools for work and outside of work compared with their midlevel-management peers. Looking at specific industries, respondents working in energy and materials and in professional services report the largest increase in gen AI use.

Investments in gen AI and analytical AI are beginning to create value

The latest survey also shows how different industries are budgeting for gen AI. Responses suggest that, in many industries, organizations are about equally as likely to be investing more than 5 percent of their digital budgets in gen AI as they are in nongenerative, analytical-AI solutions (Exhibit 5). Yet in most industries, larger shares of respondents report that their organizations spend more than 20 percent on analytical AI than on gen AI. Looking ahead, most respondents—67 percent—expect their organizations to invest more in AI over the next three years.

Where are those investments paying off? For the first time, our latest survey explored the value created by gen AI use by business function. The function in which the largest share of respondents report seeing cost decreases is human resources. Respondents most commonly report meaningful revenue increases (of more than 5 percent) in supply chain and inventory management (Exhibit 6). For analytical AI, respondents most often report seeing cost benefits in service operations—in line with what we found last year —as well as meaningful revenue increases from AI use in marketing and sales.

Inaccuracy: The most recognized and experienced risk of gen AI use

As businesses begin to see the benefits of gen AI, they’re also recognizing the diverse risks associated with the technology. These can range from data management risks such as data privacy, bias, or intellectual property (IP) infringement to model management risks, which tend to focus on inaccurate output or lack of explainability. A third big risk category is security and incorrect use.

Respondents to the latest survey are more likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider inaccuracy and IP infringement to be relevant to their use of gen AI, and about half continue to view cybersecurity as a risk (Exhibit 7).

Conversely, respondents are less likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider workforce and labor displacement to be relevant risks and are not increasing efforts to mitigate them.

In fact, inaccuracy— which can affect use cases across the gen AI value chain , ranging from customer journeys and summarization to coding and creative content—is the only risk that respondents are significantly more likely than last year to say their organizations are actively working to mitigate.

Some organizations have already experienced negative consequences from the use of gen AI, with 44 percent of respondents saying their organizations have experienced at least one consequence (Exhibit 8). Respondents most often report inaccuracy as a risk that has affected their organizations, followed by cybersecurity and explainability.

Our previous research has found that there are several elements of governance that can help in scaling gen AI use responsibly, yet few respondents report having these risk-related practices in place. 4 “ Implementing generative AI with speed and safety ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 13, 2024. For example, just 18 percent say their organizations have an enterprise-wide council or board with the authority to make decisions involving responsible AI governance, and only one-third say gen AI risk awareness and risk mitigation controls are required skill sets for technical talent.

Bringing gen AI capabilities to bear

The latest survey also sought to understand how, and how quickly, organizations are deploying these new gen AI tools. We have found three archetypes for implementing gen AI solutions : takers use off-the-shelf, publicly available solutions; shapers customize those tools with proprietary data and systems; and makers develop their own foundation models from scratch. 5 “ Technology’s generational moment with generative AI: A CIO and CTO guide ,” McKinsey, July 11, 2023. Across most industries, the survey results suggest that organizations are finding off-the-shelf offerings applicable to their business needs—though many are pursuing opportunities to customize models or even develop their own (Exhibit 9). About half of reported gen AI uses within respondents’ business functions are utilizing off-the-shelf, publicly available models or tools, with little or no customization. Respondents in energy and materials, technology, and media and telecommunications are more likely to report significant customization or tuning of publicly available models or developing their own proprietary models to address specific business needs.

Respondents most often report that their organizations required one to four months from the start of a project to put gen AI into production, though the time it takes varies by business function (Exhibit 10). It also depends upon the approach for acquiring those capabilities. Not surprisingly, reported uses of highly customized or proprietary models are 1.5 times more likely than off-the-shelf, publicly available models to take five months or more to implement.

Gen AI high performers are excelling despite facing challenges

Gen AI is a new technology, and organizations are still early in the journey of pursuing its opportunities and scaling it across functions. So it’s little surprise that only a small subset of respondents (46 out of 876) report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of gen AI. Still, these gen AI leaders are worth examining closely. These, after all, are the early movers, who already attribute more than 10 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to their use of gen AI. Forty-two percent of these high performers say more than 20 percent of their EBIT is attributable to their use of nongenerative, analytical AI, and they span industries and regions—though most are at organizations with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. The AI-related practices at these organizations can offer guidance to those looking to create value from gen AI adoption at their own organizations.

To start, gen AI high performers are using gen AI in more business functions—an average of three functions, while others average two. They, like other organizations, are most likely to use gen AI in marketing and sales and product or service development, but they’re much more likely than others to use gen AI solutions in risk, legal, and compliance; in strategy and corporate finance; and in supply chain and inventory management. They’re more than three times as likely as others to be using gen AI in activities ranging from processing of accounting documents and risk assessment to R&D testing and pricing and promotions. While, overall, about half of reported gen AI applications within business functions are utilizing publicly available models or tools, gen AI high performers are less likely to use those off-the-shelf options than to either implement significantly customized versions of those tools or to develop their own proprietary foundation models.

What else are these high performers doing differently? For one thing, they are paying more attention to gen-AI-related risks. Perhaps because they are further along on their journeys, they are more likely than others to say their organizations have experienced every negative consequence from gen AI we asked about, from cybersecurity and personal privacy to explainability and IP infringement. Given that, they are more likely than others to report that their organizations consider those risks, as well as regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, and political stability, to be relevant to their gen AI use, and they say they take steps to mitigate more risks than others do.

Gen AI high performers are also much more likely to say their organizations follow a set of risk-related best practices (Exhibit 11). For example, they are nearly twice as likely as others to involve the legal function and embed risk reviews early on in the development of gen AI solutions—that is, to “ shift left .” They’re also much more likely than others to employ a wide range of other best practices, from strategy-related practices to those related to scaling.

In addition to experiencing the risks of gen AI adoption, high performers have encountered other challenges that can serve as warnings to others (Exhibit 12). Seventy percent say they have experienced difficulties with data, including defining processes for data governance, developing the ability to quickly integrate data into AI models, and an insufficient amount of training data, highlighting the essential role that data play in capturing value. High performers are also more likely than others to report experiencing challenges with their operating models, such as implementing agile ways of working and effective sprint performance management.

About the research

The online survey was in the field from February 22 to March 5, 2024, and garnered responses from 1,363 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 981 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one business function, and 878 said their organizations were regularly using gen AI in at least one function. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky  are global coleaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and senior partners in McKinsey’s Chicago and London offices, respectively; Lareina Yee  is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, where Michael Chui , a McKinsey Global Institute partner, is a partner; and Bryce Hall  is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

They wish to thank Kaitlin Noe, Larry Kanter, Mallika Jhamb, and Shinjini Srivastava for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Atlanta office.

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The Changing Political Geography of COVID-19 Over the Last Two Years

Over the past two years, the official count of coronavirus deaths in the United States has risen and is now approaching 1 million lives. Large majorities of Americans say they personally know someone who has been hospitalized or died of the coronavirus , and it has impacted – in varying degrees – nearly every aspect of life .

A new Pew Research Center analysis of official reports of COVID-19-related deaths across the country, based on mortality data collected by The New York Times, shows how the dynamics of the pandemic have shifted over the past two years.

A timeline of the shifting geography of the pandemic

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand how the geography of the coronavirus outbreak has changed over its course. For this analysis, we relied on official reports of deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus collected and maintained by The New York Times .

The estimates provided in this report are subject to several sources of error. There may be significant differences between the true number of deaths due to COVID-19 and the official reported counts of those deaths. There may also be variation across the states in the quality and types of data reported. For example, most states report deaths based on the residency of the deceased person rather than the location where they died. The New York Times collects data from many different local health agencies, and this likely leads to some additional measurement error.

This analysis relies on county-level data. Counties in the United States vary widely in their population sizes, so in many places in the essay, we divide counties into approximately equal-sized groups (in terms of their population) for comparability or report on population adjusted death rates rather than total counts of deaths.

The pandemic has rolled across the U.S. unevenly and in waves. Today, the death toll of the pandemic looks very different from how it looked in the early part of 2020 . The first wave (roughly the first 125,000 deaths from March 2020 through June 2020) was largely geographically concentrated in the Northeast and in particular the New York City region. During the summer of 2020, the largest share of the roughly 80,000 deaths that occurred during the pandemic’s second wave were in the southern parts of the country.

The fall and winter months of 2020 and early 2021 were the deadliest of the pandemic to date. More than 370,000 Americans died of COVID-19 between October 2020 and April 2021; the geographic distinctions that characterized the earlier waves became much less pronounced.

By the spring and summer of 2021, the nationwide death rate had slowed significantly, and vaccines were widely available to all adults who wanted them. But starting at the end of the summer, the fourth and fifth waves (marked by new variants of the virus, delta and then omicron) came in quick succession and claimed more than 300,000 lives.

In many cases, the characteristics of communities that were associated with higher death rates at the beginning of the pandemic are now associated with lower death rates (and vice versa). Early in the pandemic, urban areas were disproportionately impacted. During the first wave, the coronavirus death rate in the 10% of the country that lives in the most densely populated counties was more than nine times that of the death rate among the 10% of the population living in the least densely populated counties. In each subsequent wave, however, the nation’s least dense counties have registered higher death rates than the most densely populated places.

Despite the staggering death toll in densely populated urban areas during the first months of the pandemic (an average 36 monthly deaths per 100,000 residents), the overall death rate over the course of the pandemic is slightly higher in the least populated parts of the country (an average monthly 15 deaths per 100,000 among the 10% living in the least densely populated counties vs. 13 per 100,000 among the 10% in the most densely populated counties).

As the relationship between population density and coronavirus death rates has changed over the course of the pandemic, so too has the relationship between counties’ voting patterns and their death rates from COVID-19.

In the spring of 2020, the areas recording the greatest numbers of deaths were much more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. But by the third wave of the pandemic, which began in fall 2020, the pattern had reversed: Counties that voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden were suffering substantially more deaths from the coronavirus pandemic than those that voted for Biden over Trump. This reversal is likely a result of several factors including differences in mitigation efforts and vaccine uptake, demographic differences, and other differences that are correlated with partisanship at the county level.

During this third wave – which continued into early 2021 – the coronavirus death rate among the 20% of Americans living in counties that supported Trump by the highest margins in 2020 was about 170% of the death rate among the one-in-five Americans living in counties that supported Biden by the largest margins.

As vaccines became more widely available, this discrepancy between “blue” and “red” counties became even larger as the virulent delta strain of the pandemic spread across the country during the summer and fall of 2021, even as the total number of deaths fell somewhat from its third wave peak.

During the fourth wave of the pandemic, death rates in the most pro-Trump counties were about four times what they were in the most pro-Biden counties. When the highly transmissible omicron variant began to spread in the U.S. in late 2021, these differences narrowed substantially. However, death rates in the most pro-Trump counties were still about 180% of what they were in the most pro-Biden counties throughout late 2021 and early 2022.

The cumulative impact of these divergent death rates is a wide difference in total deaths from COVID-19 between the most pro-Trump and most pro-Biden parts of the country. Since the pandemic began, counties representing the 20% of the population where Trump ran up his highest margins in 2020 have experienced nearly 70,000 more deaths from COVID-19 than have the counties representing the 20% of population where Biden performed best. Overall, the COVID-19 death rate in all c ounties Trump won in 2020 is substantially higher than it is in counties Biden won (as of the end of February 2022, 326 per 100,000 in Trump counties and 258 per 100,000 in Biden counties).

Partisan divide in COVID-19 deaths widened as more vaccines became available

Partisan differences in COVID-19 death rates expanded dramatically after the availability of vaccines increased. Unvaccinated people are at far higher risk of death and hospitalization from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and vaccination decisions are strongly associated with partisanship . Among the large majority of counties for which reliable vaccination data exists, counties that supported Trump at higher margins have substantially lower vaccination rates than those that supported Biden at higher margins.

Counties with lower rates of vaccination registered substantially greater death rates during each wave in which vaccines were widely available.

During the fall of 2021 (roughly corresponding to the delta wave), about 10% of Americans lived in counties with adult vaccination rates lower than 40% as of July 2021. Death rates in these low-vaccination counties were about six times as high as death rates in counties where 70% or more of the adult population was vaccinated.

More Americans were vaccinated heading into the winter of 2021 and 2022 (roughly corresponding to the omicron wave), but nearly 10% of the country lived in areas where less than half of the adult population was vaccinated as of November 2021. Death rates in these low-vaccination counties were roughly twice what they were in counties that had 80% or more of their population vaccinated. ( Note: The statistics here reflect the death rates in the county as a whole, not rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, though individual-level data finds that death rates among unvaccinated people are far higher than among vaccinated people.)

This analysis relies on official reports of deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the United States collected and reported by The New York Times .

COVID-19 deaths in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories are not included in this analysis. Additionally, deaths without a specific geographic location have been excluded.

Data was pulled from the GitHub repository maintained by The New York Times on March 1, 2022, and reflects reported coronavirus deaths through Feb. 28.

There are several anomalies in the deaths data. Many locales drop off their reporting on the weekends and holidays. In addition to the rhythm of the reporting cycle, there are many instances where a locality will revise the count of its deaths downward (usually only by a small amount) or release a large batch of previously unreported deaths on a single day. The downward revisions were identified and retroactively applied to earlier days.

Large batches of cases were identified by finding days that increased by more than 10 deaths and were 10 standard deviations above the norm for a county within a 30-day window. Deaths reported in these anomalous batches were then evenly distributed across the days leading up to when they were released.

Population data for U.S. counties comes from the 2015-2019 American Community Survey estimates published by the Census Bureau (accessed through the tidycensus package in R on Feb. 21). The 2020 vote share for each county was purchased from Dave Leip’s Election Atlas (downloaded on Nov. 21, 2021).

The analysis looks at deaths among counties based on their 2020 vote. Counties were grouped into five groups with approximately equal population. For analyses that include 2020 vote, Alaskan counties are excluded because Alaska does not report its election results at the county level. The table below provides more details.

This essay benefited greatly from thoughtful comments and consultation with many individuals around Pew Research Center. Jocelyn Kiley, Carroll Doherty and Jeb Bell provided invaluable editorial guidance. Peter Bell and Alissa Scheller contributed their expertise in visualization, Ben Wormald built the map animation, and Reem Nadeem did the digital production. Andrew Daniller provided careful attention to the quality check process, and David Kent’s watchful copy editing eye brought clarity to some difficult concepts.

Lead photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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