What Is a Literature Review?
What is a literature review? This is a common question among students, especially among undergraduate students who have never before been faced with writing one. This leads a lot of them to mistakenly believe that all they have to do is sit down and give their opinion on a book or a short story. In truth, the subject of your review can be just about anything: you can choose a novel, a story, a poem, a book of poetry, even a government pamphlet or something of that nature. You can even focus on a group of literature written, for example, in the eighteenth century.
When it comes to how to write a literature review, a lot of students also make the mistake of thinking that all they have to do is describe what happened in whatever they read for review, and then address their thoughts on it. While that is part of the process, it is only a small part. Unlike academic papers and other essays, a literature review focuses mainly on material that already exists. For instance, not only can you look up a literary review example for whatever your subject is on, but you actually should do this. You should find a lot of examples – for instance, say that you choose to discuss the prevalence of religion and sensuality in John Donne’s famous Holy Sonnets. You would then need to seek out sources that focus on the same subject, whether loosely or literally, so that you can trace how other people proved their arguments and reached their conclusions.
Do you agree with the link between sensuality and religion, or do you see Donne’s series of sonnets as something different? If so, you can still use the aforementioned sources; you would then make your thesis statement revolve around why you think these other reviews and essays are wrong. Like most academic papers, reviews have to have a thesis. In this case, it will be about why you do or do not agree with a theme, a link, a conclusion, et cetera; the body of your review will then contain proof from other sources.
Again, as with all academic papers, you need to make sure that your final topic is not too broad; otherwise, you will be writing for months! In literature, there is really nothing new under the sun – every topic you can possibly imagine likely has at least a few hundred papers already written on it. That does not mean, however, that you cannot give old information a new twist in your literature review. In fact, wherever possible, you should try to do that; you should just do your best to do so within the correct bounds.
There is a wealth of literature review help out there and your professors will generally provide you with plenty of sources where you can find pertinent information. Just keep in mind that, unlike research papers, you are not exactly being asked to find something new; you are simply being asked to discuss existing things and give your take on the matter in your literature review.
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