Introduction

Conventional study guides and essay-writing manuals can be positively unhelpful to literature students, since the kind of advice about researching and structuring an essay which is useful and relevant if you are studying history or sociology or law is only too likely to prove limitingly rigid and restrictive when applied to such a creative and wide-ranging subject as literature. This book has been written especially for university students of English and foreign literature and tries to combine detailed practical advice with an introduction to the intellectual scope and imaginative possibilities of literary criticism. It covers every stage of the essay-writing process, from reading the text and choosing and researching a topic to referencing and presentation, as well as giving advice on safe computer use and tackling the all-important question of will-power. For students of foreign literature there is also a section on adult language learning and translation skills. However, the major emphasis throughout is on the art and craft of writing. If you have an ambition to write as well as possible about literature, both because it is a subject you are passionately interested in and because you are eager to make your own discoveries and experiments with language, this book is for you. If, on the other hand, you have chosen to study literature at university because you are passionately interested in student politics or journalism or sport, or because you want to take a degree in the subject you came top in at school as a prelude to becoming a librarian, accountant or lawyer-all good and honourable reasons for taking a degree in literature-then this book will give you a useful grounding in the technicalities of structure, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation and spelling, as well as helping you with background research, computer skills and presentation, but it won’t pretend to tell you how to get a decent degree result without the expenditure of anything much in the way of time, patience and hard work. This is a guidebook, not a primer. It doesn’t dictate how you should interpret the literature you write about or steer you towards one particular school of criticism, it doesn’t give you model answers or pre-packaged ways of constructing an essay, and it certainly doesn’t offer you neat formulae for

impressing your tutors or bluffing your way through exams. Instead it tries to help you to think through your own ideas and express them cogently and lucidly. In other words, this is primarily a book for people who want to learn a challenging professional skill, and are prepared to put in the hours, and the effort, and the independent thought needed to become real writers.