Literature

If your professor has asked you to use critical articles or scholarly articles, that is literary criticism. Literary criticism explains, explores, examines, and otherwise discusses works of literature. When you write a paper about a work of literature, you are writing literary criticism. Many of our databases include some literary criticism; those listed below focus on it.

• Most literary criticism (including yours!) consists of scholarly books or articles which refer to original works of literature, to other literary criticism, and sometimes to other sources - historical, philosophical, political, economic, musical, mathematical, you name it! They are SECONDARY SOURCES.
• Book reviews, except maybe if they're very well-researched and thorough, don't count as literary criticism.
• Literary theory is related to literary criticism but is more theoretical and less focused on examining specific works of literature and their authors.