Critical Essay - Academic Mode

Definition of critical essay
Contrary to the literal name "critical", this type of essay is not only an interpretation, but also an evaluation of a literary work. It is written for a specific audience, who is academically mature enough to understand the points raised. A literary essay might revolve around the main literary motifs, themes, resources and terms, directions, meanings, and most of all the structure of a literary work.

Evolution of the critical essay
Critical essays in English began with Samuel Johnson. critical essays limited to his personal opinion, which include praise, admiration and censure of the merits and demerits of the literary works that are analyzed in them; however, it was Matthew Arnold who established the canons of literary critical essays. must be interpretive, and there must be no bias or sympathy in the criticism

Critical essay examples in literature
Example # 1: Jack and Gill: A Mock Criticism (by Joseph Dennie)
“The characters you see now, their situation is next to be discovered. We are informed of this immediately in the next line, when we are told,

Jack and Gill
They climbed a hill.

Here are the different images, but the concise description. We immediately imagine the two individuals traveling up a climb, which we can adjust to our own ideas of declination, sterility, rockiness, sandiness, etc. who, if exercised the imagination, are beauties of high rank. The reader I will forgive my guess if I try to address a new principle here that no critic with whom I am familiar has ever mentioned. It is that poetic beauties can be divided into negative and positive, the former consisting of the mere absence of guilt, the latter in the presence of Excellency; the first of an inferior order, but which requires considerable critical acumen to discover it, the latter of higher rank but evident to the least capacity. “

This is an excerpt from the critical essay by Joseph Dennie in which Dennie has interpreted the structure and content of Jack and Jill.

Example 2: About knocking on the gate in Macbeth (by Thomas De Quincey)
“ But about this digression returning, my understanding could not provide a reason why the knocking on the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflective. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better; I had a feeling that it was; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. Finally, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his stage debut on the Ratcliffe Highway and executed those incomparable murders which have given him such a brilliant and undying reputation, on which, by the way, I must observe that in one respect they have had a negative effect, by making the expert In murder, be very demanding on your taste and feel dissatisfied with anything that has been done since then in that line. ”

This is an excerpt by Thomas De Quincey on his criticism of Macbeth, a play by William Shakespeare. light on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the thought of him. This is a kind of interpretive essay.

Example no. 3: A Sample Critical Essay on Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (by Richard Nordquist)
"To keep Jake Barnes drunk, fed, clean, mobile and distracted in The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway employs a large entourage of junior officials: maids, taxi drivers, waiters, porters, tailors, shoe shiners, barbers, policemen, and a town idiot. As seen working quietly in the background of the novel, the most familiar figure is by far the waiter. In the cafes of Paris to Madrid, from one dawn to the next, more than two dozen waiters deliver drinks and convey messages to Barnes and his compatriots. So frequently in attendance and so indistinguishable from each other, these diverse waiters seem to melt into a single iconic figure at As the novel progresses, an unbiased observer of human vanity, this figure does more than serve food and drink - it serves to illuminate the character of Jake Barnes. ”

This is an excerpt from an essay on Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. In this paragraph all characters of the novel are mentioned in an interpretive way. It also highlights the main motive of the essay.

Features of a critical essay
A critical essay intends to convey specific meanings of a literary text to a particular audience. These specific target groups are knowledgeable people. You will learn not only the advantages and disadvantages of literary texts, but also different shades and nuances of meanings. The main function of a literary essay is to convince people to read a literary text for the reasons described.