ENG 202: Writing and Research in English

There are many perspectives from which an author’s works may be read, analyzed and evaluated. Our library offers ways into a range of these perspectives, including many individual volumes devoted solely to criticism of an author’s works or even of an individual work. It is crucial to know a volume of literary criticism when you see one; that is, to be able to tell that a certain book you have in hand is a book reflecting on and responding to an author’s work rather than, say, a biography of an author or an edition of an author’s work. The Twayne series of volume devoted to individual authors, for example, is mostly literary criticism, though each volume also contains biographical information on the author. To complicate things a bit further, there are also editions of author’s works that combine, say, a reliable text of a novel with literary criticism of the novel: the most well-known series of this type is the Norton Critical Editions. Finally, there are anthologies of important critical essays about an author, such as the Twentieth-Century Views series or the Chelsea House publications supervised by Harold Bloom.