Writing about Literature introduces students to critical reading and writing through a thorough and engaging discussion of the field, but also through exercises, interviews, exemplary student and scholarly essays, and visual material. It offers students an insider’s guide to the language, issues, approaches, styles, assumptions, and traditions that inform the writing of successful critical essays, and aims to make student writers a part of the world of professional literary criticism.

Much of the discussion is structured around ways to analyze and respond to a single work, Stephen Crane’s story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” This second edition is updated throughout and includes a new chapter on “Reading and Writing About Poetry”; the chapter uses Robert Kroetsch’s poem “This Part of the Country” as the unit of analysis and includes an interview with the poet about his process.

W.F. Garrett-Petts, James Hoffman, and Ginny Ratsoy are associated with Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. Whose Culture Is It, Anyway? and its predecessor, The Small Cities Book, both grew out of a long-running Community-University Research Agreement administered through TRU.

W.F. Garrett-Petts' profile page

“I have used Writing about Literature a number of times to great success. As it progressively takes students from being uninformed readers of a literary text to becoming engaged critics in conversation with advanced scholars, it provides an invaluable framework for introducing students to the fundamental goals and techniques of critical writing, the kinds of issues that critics explore and evidence that they use, strategies for presenting and organizing critical arguments, and the necessity of revision in the writing of criticism. This new edition’s section on writing about poetry will certainly broaden the appeal of the book to students and instructors.” — Paul C. Jones, Ohio University

“Covering topics from close reading to theory, and from visually mapping drafts to final revisions, this book is ideal for introductory courses in literature or composition. But Writing about Literature does more than serve as a guide for students seeking to become careful readers and clear writers: it teaches them how to be students at university and scholars in the field. The addition of poetry in the second edition widens the scope of the book in terms of genre and methodologies, while it retains the deep conceptional framework of the first.” — Emily Kugler, Colby College