How to Write a Literary Research Paper

How to Write a Good Literary Research Paper?

Students of Literary Studies often come across the need to compose research assignments on various works of literature. The world literature legacy is varied, diverse, and extremely rich, with numerous genres, authors, and topics offering a literally endless field for examination and interpretation.

Yet, not all learners are born with a natural talent for assignment writing. That’s why you may experience some degree of confusion or friction when composing literary papers. Here is a guide that will help you out and instruct you on every step of this task’s completion. We’ve compiled pro tips and expert advice in one place to accelerate your path to excellence and self-development.

What Is a Literary Research Paper?

The first notable point is that a research paper is an academic project requiring more time and effort than a regular essay. While essays are smaller and less structured, research papers are usually explicitly categorized into sections, with a logical flow of data from one section to another. Thus, you shouldn’t take this assignment lightly; it will need more hours of research, methodology formulation, and interpretation of results than other assignments may entail.

As its name suggests, this research paper should deal with a specific assigned work of literature; it may be a book, an article, or any other piece of writing of particular interest and relevance to your course of study. That’s why you should adopt a systematic approach to analyzing that intellectual product and offering your unique insights into it, backed by scholarly sources and individual analysis.

How to Start a Literary Research Paper?

Preparation for a literary research project is the most important phase that makes or breaks your study. Here are the standard literary research paper guidelines for everyone approaching such an assignment and seeking a systematic, step-by-step guide to writing it correctly.

#1 Understand the Prompt

This step is the most important, as it sets the stage for the correct completion of any assignment. Students who don’t read a prompt carefully risk going off-topic or choosing the wrong arguments or object of research. In any way, ignoring your supervisor’s instructions is a sure way to deprive yourself of a high grade.

#2 Formulate a Research Question

Now that you understand the prompt inside out, it’s time to find a relevant, interesting, and debatable question for analysis. Even if you’re assigned some classical work of literature, try to find some original perspectives and go a bit farther beyond self-obvious research perspectives and angles. These efforts will always pay off in the form of high grades.

#3 Define Your Approach

What aspect of the work will you consider? Do you want to link the themes in the book with the author’s biography? Do you want to trace the main characters’ traits to the author’s values, life events, and meaningful people around them? Maybe you’re more interested in symbolism, stylistic devices, and narrative structure. It’s impossible to grasp everything in one research paper, so you should determine a narrower approach at this point.

#4 Collect Relevant Information

After you’ve defined the scope and angle of your study, you should proceed to research. Study the available databases and scholarly materials in your educational institution. Search through online libraries and professional organizations dealing with literary analysis. You’re sure to find many informative and insightful publications about the work you need to analyze.

#5 Analyze Your Findings

We assume that by this moment, you have already read the literary work inside out, found an interesting topic, and compiled a list of valuable arguments for the analysis. Now comes the time for actual analysis – find supporting quotes in the text to back up your arguments and structure your narrative for it to sound logical and coherent.

#6 Compose the Research Paper

The final stage is writing the paper itself. You should compose all sections in line with the structuring requirements and include all vital details in the text so that it flows well.

#7 Edit the Work

Editing and proofreading are also key to success. Give yourself some time after writing, and then return to the text with a fresh eye. You’re sure to notice some errors and inconsistencies you might have missed at first.

How to Structure a Literary Research Paper?

Let’s summarize what a generic literary research paper outline should include in most cases – please keep in mind that your structure may deviate from this one depending on the professor’s prompt.

The introductory part of this study should first catch the reader’s attention with some interesting facts about the author or work you’re analyzing. Then, you can state a topic and narrow it down by explaining when the work of literature was written, what genre it belongs to, what themes it raises, and why it possesses significance in the world of literature. These materials can set the stage for a more detailed discussion and link to the final part of the introduction – a thesis statement and your objectives.

The next part of the paper should present a more detailed analysis of the literary work’s historical context and background. It’s impossible to decipher the author’s intentions and ideas if you don’t understand what life events affected them, what ills and misfortunes the author went through, and what social, cultural, political, or personal changes inspired the work.

Once the historical context and biographical details relating to the piece of literature are determined, it’s time to proceed to a closer analysis and interpretation. If you deal with literary analysis of the main characters, you may cite several quotes from the text to illustrate their traits and features. These quotes should be backed by external evidence from literary critics and your own interpretations to make the research comprehensive and credible.

After the analysis is fully exhausted, you need to wrap up everything you’ve said with a summary of the main points. The concluding section may also revisit the thesis statement and the initial research objectives or questions, focusing on whether the research aim was achieved or not. A vital part of the conclusion is to reflect on your intellectual progress and underline the original findings you’ve arrived at in the process of investigation. It also makes sense to draw broader implications from this piece of literature for the genre, the historical epoch, or the author’s literary legacy.

How to End a Literary Research Paper?

Let’s stop in a bit more detail on the ending of a literary assignment; as a rule, experts advise that it should be broader than a simple summary of your main points. When composing the concluding part of your research paper, you should think of the following:

• Did I address all points from my thesis statement?
• Did I complete all my research objectives?
• Did I answer all the questions posed in the introduction?
• What are the main points I’ve arrived at?
• What value do my findings hold for literary studies?
• What is my new knowledge about the author and this piece of literature?
• Where do my findings lead me further in research?
• What implications do my findings have for my academic discipline?
• What else can be researched in this area to give readers a better understanding of this literary work?

Literary Research Paper Outline

Based on what we’ve just covered, let’s compose a universal outline for your literature project. You may tweak and modify some of its parts depending on the topic and prompt you get from your tutor.

1. Introduction
   1. The opening statement about the work of literature and its full introduction.
   2. General details about the analyzed literary work and its author.
   3. Thesis statement with a research focus and aim.
2. Body of the paper
   1. Historical context of the literary work.
   2. Related biographical details of the author.
   3. Closer review of the main figurative language, stylistic, and imagery techniques.
   4. Step-by-step analysis of the selected elements of the work.
   5. Discussion of the obtained findings in line with the previously published research about the selected piece of literature.
3. Conclusion
   1. Summary of the main points and findings.
   2. A broader review of the findings’ implications for your field of literary studies.
   3. Call to action or broader implications.

Literary Research Paper Introduction

Now, let’s dwell on each part in a bit more detail to see how you can structure it to get the highest grade. The main elements of your opening section should be as follows:

• An opening hook that catches the reader’s attention and creates a sense of suspense.
• Coverage of the main topic and your research focus.
• Contextual data and details about the work of literature that introduce the readers to your subject.
• A thesis statement that condenses the main research idea and guides the readers towards the structure of argumentation.

A thesis statement is the central point of your professor’s interest in the assignment. That’s why you should dedicate enough attention to formulate it well. Focus on the following excellence criteria of your statement:

• Limit the scope of your research – name the literary work’s author, period, or genre, depending on what aspect of the literary work you’ll be focusing on.
• Define the theme, symbols, characters, or stylistic devices you plan to analyze.
• Keep the list of ideas down to a minimum, and don’t mention the ones you won’t cover in the body of the paper.
• Set the boundaries of your analysis and argumentation.

Literary Research Paper Body

Since literary papers usually focus on a specific work of literature, their bodies don’t meet the usual structural requirements for this assignment type. As a rule, you won’t have a literature review or methodology section, as you don’t apply any scientific method in your inquiry. It is enough to state which aspects of the paper you will be focusing on – for example, some authors are famous for the use of specific stylistic devices (e.g., Kurt Vonnegut’s symbolism), and you dig deeper into the literary text to find those devices and examine their role in the text.

No matter what structure you choose for your research paper’s body, one thing should remain unchanged: a consistent paragraph structure. Make sure you start every paragraph with a topic sentence that communicates your main idea and sets the stage for more detailed analysis. Next, you should give supporting evidence for the topic sentence’s idea – it may be either a quote from the literary piece or external evidence from published studies about this literary work. The final part of your paragraph should always be dedicated to your personal interpretation of the object of analysis and a link to the next paragraph. This way, you will ensure consistency in your approach and make the content coherent and reader-friendly.

Literary Research Paper Conclusion

The final section is a wrap-up of everything you’ve found in the process of analysis. Don’t forget to move beyond a plain summary and present a broader evaluation of the study’s significance, novelty, and original contribution to your academic area.

Paper Formatting Guidelines

When composing literature-related assignments, you should be attentive to your professor’s formatting and referencing guidelines. As a rule, literary analysis presupposes using the MLA referencing style:

• Don’t use a separate title page; use only a small header with the student’s details, professor and course name, and date in the upper left corner.
• Left-align the text of your assignment.
• Use double spacing and apply 11 pt Arial or 12 pt Times New Roman.
• Use 1-inch margins on all sides of the page; make the text double-spaced.
• Use the author-page citation format for external evidence.
• Name the reference page “Works Cited.”
• List the authors in alphabetical order in compliance with the MLA citation manual.

Those of you who get a task to follow APA guidelines may be wondering, “How to write a literary research paper in APA format?” We have a list of requirements for you as well:

• Make a separate APA-style title page with the title of your paper (10-12 words), the author, the affiliation with an educational institution, and the date.
• Add an abstract that gives a one-paragraph summary of your study’s main points and features.
• Use 12 pt Times New Roman font.
• Use double spacing, with 1-inch margins on all sides of the page.
• Use the author-date form of citing external evidence.
• Title the last page of your paper as “References” and place all academic sources in alphabetical order.

So, this is everything you should know about literary research and analysis. Follow these tips, and your papers will always be graded highly for full compliance with rigorous academic standards and requirements.