Literature Handbook: A Guide to Literary Analysis

Insight’s Literature Handbook: A Guide to Literary Analysis is a comprehensive and accessible reference book for middle through to senior secondary-school students of English literature. It introduces the essential knowledge and skills for analysing the traditional literary forms of novels, short stories, drama and poetry. It also includes chapters on analysing film and literary nonfiction.

The Literature Handbook also explains and models the ways in which a range of theoretical frameworks can be used to create different readings of literary works, making this book a versatile and practical resource for all literature students.

The book features:

• Definitions of the main terms and techniques used by writers of novels, short stories, plays, poems and nonfiction, and by creators of films
• Hundreds of examples from a wide range of texts, including excerpts from prose fiction, drama and poetry
• Explanations of the features and conventions of a range of literary forms and styles, such as romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism
• Guidelines on how to write a close analysis of a passage or poem, and complete sample essays
• Models of critical approaches to literature, including an overview of the main literary theories
• A literary timeline from ancient Greece to the present and a comprehensive glossary of literary terms for quick reference