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The Relationship Between Literature and Art

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Art and Literature 

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Art and Literature are bound together in several ways. Great works of art have inspired great works of literature, great works of literature have inspired art, and together art and literature have simultaneously represented similar movements. Art and literature can be seen weaving around each other, influencing one and another, and being used as a tool to teach students about liberal arts and humanity.  Although the works I have selected range from several genres and five centuries, they are related because they refer to great works of literature.  All of these works have been used in my literature classrooms as tools to understand specific works or movements.  No matter how different they are, they aid in understanding the written world through visual imagery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3wz9wg0Dos The video that I have chosen shows an artist going through the steps of creating an expressionistic work.  This was important to me because the steps that he was taking reminded me very much of the steps that I as an English literature major were taught in creative writing when working through drafts of a written work.  It also shows expressionism which is still a very popular style and can be seen in my favorite writings, particularly great American plays. 

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literature , a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. Literature may be classified according to a variety of systems, including language , national origin, historical period, genre , and subject matter.

For historical treatment of various literatures within geographical regions, see such articles as African literature ; African theater ; Oceanic literature ; Western literature ; Central Asian arts ; South Asian arts ; and Southeast Asian arts . Some literatures are treated separately by language, by nation, or by special subject (e.g., Arabic literature , Celtic literature , Latin literature , French literature , Japanese literature , and biblical literature ).

Definitions of the word literature tend to be circular. The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary considers literature to be “writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.” The 19th-century critic Walter Pater referred to “the matter of imaginative or artistic literature” as a “transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinitely varied forms.” But such definitions assume that the reader already knows what literature is. And indeed its central meaning, at least, is clear enough. Deriving from the Latin littera , “a letter of the alphabet,” literature is first and foremost humankind’s entire body of writing; after that it is the body of writing belonging to a given language or people; then it is individual pieces of writing.

But already it is necessary to qualify these statements. To use the word writing when describing literature is itself misleading, for one may speak of “oral literature” or “the literature of preliterate peoples.” The art of literature is not reducible to the words on the page; they are there solely because of the craft of writing. As an art, literature might be described as the organization of words to give pleasure. Yet through words literature elevates and transforms experience beyond “mere” pleasure. Literature also functions more broadly in society as a means of both criticizing and affirming cultural values.

The scope of literature

Literature is a form of human expression. But not everything expressed in words—even when organized and written down—is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily informative—technical, scholarly, journalistic—would be excluded from the rank of literature by most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all.

The purest (or, at least, the most intense) literary form is the lyric poem, and after it comes elegiac, epic , dramatic, narrative, and expository verse. Most theories of literary criticism base themselves on an analysis of poetry , because the aesthetic problems of literature are there presented in their simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry at all but verse . Many novels —certainly all the world’s great novels—are literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the Chinese , possessors of one of the world’s greatest dramatic traditions, consider their plays, with few exceptions, to possess no literary merit whatsoever).

The Greeks thought of history as one of the seven arts, inspired by a goddess, the muse Clio. All of the world’s classic surveys of history can stand as noble examples of the art of literature, but most historical works and studies today are not written primarily with literary excellence in mind, though they may possess it, as it were, by accident.

The essay was once written deliberately as a piece of literature: its subject matter was of comparatively minor importance. Today most essays are written as expository, informative journalism , although there are still essayists in the great tradition who think of themselves as artists. Now, as in the past, some of the greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama , and the arts.

Some personal documents ( autobiographies , diaries , memoirs , and letters ) rank among the world’s greatest literature. Some examples of this biographical literature were written with posterity in mind, others with no thought of their being read by anyone but the writer. Some are in a highly polished literary style; others, couched in a privately evolved language, win their standing as literature because of their cogency, insight, depth, and scope.

Many works of philosophy are classed as literature. The Dialogues of Plato (4th century bc ) are written with great narrative skill and in the finest prose; the Meditations of the 2nd-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random thoughts, and the Greek in which they are written is eccentric . Yet both are classed as literature, while the speculations of other philosophers, ancient and modern, are not. Certain scientific works endure as literature long after their scientific content has become outdated. This is particularly true of books of natural history, where the element of personal observation is of special importance. An excellent example is Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789).

Oratory , the art of persuasion, was long considered a great literary art. The oratory of Native Americans, for instance, is famous, while in Classical Greece, Polymnia was the muse sacred to poetry and oratory. Rome’s great orator Cicero was to have a decisive influence on the development of English prose style. Abraham Lincoln ’s Gettysburg Address is known to every American schoolchild. Today, however, oratory is more usually thought of as a craft than as an art. Most critics would not admit advertising copywriting, purely commercial fiction , or cinema and television scripts as accepted forms of literary expression, although others would hotly dispute their exclusion. The test in individual cases would seem to be one of enduring satisfaction and, of course, truth. Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult to categorize literature, for in modern civilization words are everywhere. Humans are subject to a continuous flood of communication . Most of it is fugitive, but here and there—in high-level journalism, in television, in the cinema, in commercial fiction, in westerns and detective stories, and in plain, expository prose—some writing, almost by accident, achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth and relevance that entitle it to stand with other examples of the art of literature.

The Intersection of Art and Literature: Exploring the Connections Between Two Creative Forms

P Abigail Sadhana Rao

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

― Leonardo da Vinci

Art and literature are two creative forms that have been intertwined throughout history. Both forms of expression seek to explore the human experience, conveying emotion and meaning through the use of language and imagery. In this blog post, we will explore the connections between art and literature, examining how these two forms of expression intersect and influence one another.

Visual Storytelling in Literature

Literature often involves visual storytelling, with writers using vivid descriptions and imagery to create a world that readers can visualise in their minds. This visual storytelling can be seen in works of fiction like J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, where the author’s detailed descriptions of Middle-earth bring the world to life. The visual imagery of literature can also inspire visual art, with artists like Gustave Doré and John Tenniel creating illustrations for classic works of literature like “The Divine Comedy” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

Literary References in Visual Art

Literature has also influenced visual art, with many artists drawing inspiration from literary works. For example, in the 19th-century masterpiece by Millais , the artist explores Shakespeare’s Hamlet, presenting the poignant figure of Ophelia. Driven to madness after her father’s murder by Hamlet, the painting captures Ophelia in a haunting moment of serenity before her tragic drowning. Millais’s acclaimed artistic skill, particularly the realism in the landscape, distinguishes this portrayal. It stands as one of numerous interpretations immortalising Ophelia’s tragic narrative. The connection between literature and visual art can also be seen in the work of contemporary artist Nina Chanel Abney, who often incorporates literary references and themes into her vibrant and colourful paintings.

Collaborations Between Artists and Writers

Collaborations between artists and writers have resulted in some of the most iconic works of art and literature. For example, the famous collaboration between pop artist Andy Warhol and writer Truman Capote, who worked together on the magazine Interview in the 1970s. In 1969, Salva dor Dal í embarked on a captivating collaboration with Lewis Carroll’s timeless tale, Alice in Wonderland. The result was an extraordinary suite of illustrations that swiftly became one of the most coveted Dalí collections.

Art and Literature in Contemporary Culture

In contemporary culture, art and literature continue to intersect and influence one another. For example, graphic novels like “Watchmen” by Alan Moore and “Maus” by Art Spiegelman combine visual art and storytelling to create a unique and powerful form of expression. The intersection of art and literature can also be seen in the work of contemporary artists like Kara Walker and Jeff Koons, who incorporate literary themes and imagery into their work.

Impact on Society

The intersection of art and literature is important in society because it allows us to explore and express the human experience in different ways. Both forms of expression can challenge societal norms and provoke thought and reflection. By bringing together different creative forms, we can create new and innovative ways of understanding and interpreting the world around us.

Art and literature have a long history of intersecting and influencing one another. Whether it’s visual storytelling in literature, literary references in visual art, collaborations between artists and writers, or the importance of art and literature in contemporary culture, the connections between these two forms of expression are undeniable. As we continue to explore the intersection of art and literature, we can expect to see new and exciting developments that push the boundaries of both creative forms, contributing to the growth of art and literature.

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The art of literature, art in literature.

Edited by Magdalena Bleinert, Izabela Curyłło-Klag, and Bożena Kucała

Jagiellonian University Press

Pub Date: March 2015

ISBN: 9788323337799

Format: Paperback

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The authors' selection of themes and titles comprehensively represents contemporary research on the intersections among literary studies and other disciplines. A valuable resource for scholars and general readers thanks to its diversity and the relevance of the problems it discusses. Miroslawa Buchholtz, Mikolaj Kopernik University, Torun

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Critique d’art

Actualité internationale de la littérature critique sur l’art contemporain

Accueil Numéros 54 Articles Contemporary Art and Literature: ...

Contemporary Art and Literature: Post-conceptualism, “documentality” and creative grafts

Toulouse : Le Printemps de septembre, 2019, 144p. ill. en noir et en coul. 18 x 11cm, fre/eng

ISBN : 9782956551409. _ 12,00 €

Texte de Thierry Leviez, D. Shrigley

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Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe : IMEC éditeur, 2019, 169p. ill. en noir et en coul. 26 x 20cm, (Le Lieu de l’archive)

ISBN : 9782359430264. _ 28,00 €

Sous la dir. de Valérie Mréjen. Préf. de Nathalie Léger, Pierre Leroy

Paris : Questions théoriques, 2020, 187p. ill. 20 x 13cm, (Forbidden Beach)

ISBN : 9782917131459. _ 15,00 €

Préf. de Christophe Hanna

Paris : Gallimard, 2019, 302p. ill. en noir et en coul. 22 x 17cm, (Art et artistes)

ISBN : 9782072843433. _ 28,00 €

• Lire l'article de Pauline Goutain Publication le 04 juin 2021

Dijon : Les presses du réel, 2019, 408p. 21 x 16cm, (Figures)

Bibliogr. Index

ISBN : 9782378960940. _ 24,00 €

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Toulouse : Le Printemps de septembre, 2019, 112p. ill. 18 x 11cm

ISBN : 9782956551423. _ 12,00 €

Texte intégral

• 1 Vouilloux, Bernard. Le Tournant «  artiste » de la littérature française : écrire avec la peinture a (...)

1 A rt and literature. These terms reflect a French tradition built at the intersection of writing and the visual arts, particularly painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and film. The synthesis of the arts, starting with the Realist and Symbolist movements, reshaped artistic modernity until the advent of the avant-gardes and Surrealism, by closely associating visual, poetic and narrative practices. Bernard Vouilloux, retracing the history of these interactions, particularly in the 19 th century, pointed out a corresponding “artistic turn in literature”. 1 Since this turn, the study of drawings by writers, as well as books and writings by artists, has been constructed through a twofold aesthetic interpretation, which, however, maintains a political distance between the verbal and the visual. In this regard, the book by Annie Le Brun, Un Espace inobjectif : entre les mots et les images , weaves its way into this tradition while trying to reduce and evade the distance. Firstly, the relationship between art and literature – which in her writings is rooted in the avant-gardes – takes on a personal dimension which deploys an imaginary of networks and constellations. She then explores, through an unusual approach, what she calls “inobjective space”, which is “neither objective nor subjective” and which ventures into the discontinuities of the encounters “between words and images”. This intermediate space aims to go beyond the binarity of written and visual works, of verbal and fine arts. Narratives – in the widest sense – are not necessarily readable: they are a visual palimpsest. Similarly, images can be absent, thus requiring a Surrealist literary imaginary or its processes. A collection of reviews and lectures, the book revisits encounters: anatomy plates commented by Roger Caillois, the eroticism of Toyen’s paintings – one perceives the assimilation of Surrealist and Sadean texts, of which Annie Le Brun is a specialist, and which are featured throughout the essays. This interpretation, articulated in the light of texts and books, revitalises lesser-known works of the Surrealist spectrum, such as those by artists Leonora Carrington and Mimi Parent or the poet Radovan Ivšić.

2 Gleize, Jean-Marie. Littéralité , Paris: Questions théoriques, 2015, (Forbidden Beach)

3 See: Théval, Gaëlle. Poésie ready-made XXe-XXIe siècles , Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015, (Arts et médias)

2 The dissatisfaction born from the opposition between sign systems and periodisations has led Pascal Mougin to question the convergence of the arts within two historic sequences: the modern and the contemporary. Though his examination of European and American conceptual art’s uses of language and poetry, as well as the debates surrounding the definition of literature, he contends that “de-definitions” and “desidentifications”, operated simultaneously by conceptualism and minimalism in art and literature, signal “a new form of aesthetic relationship” determined by the convergence of the arts. It was introduced by the idea of the “Death of the author” formulated by Roland Barthes in 1967. The essay was published in Aspen’ s “Minimalism Issue”, edited by Brian O’Doherty, and represents the tipping point for a “performative” concept of literature. Thus, forms of writing that partake in conceptual processes – which Pascal Mougin names “conceptualisms” – all fall under the same contemporary regime, currently characterised by what franck leibovici has defined as “writing operations”. The historic progression of Pascal Mougin’s recent work is introduced by Conceptual art and ends in France with “post-poetry” and the advent of “writing without writing”, the logical consequence of an authorless art which values copy and appropriation – as stated by Kenneth Goldsmith, who is also the founder of the free resource website UbuWeb (ubu.com). In this overview, which extends to creative algorithms, the historic background for writing’s “contemporaneity” is shaped by white writing in the style of Robbe-Grillet and the “literality” formulated by Jean-Marie Gleize 2 . This idea participates in the continuity of the aesthetics of the ready-made 3 , neutrality and documentary, which is echoed by publications connected to these tendencies, as well as exhibition cycles that restage the interactions between poetic, linguistic, and visual creations in the sphere of minor creative practices.

• 4 Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation , Chicago: University of (...)

5 Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse”, October , no. 110, Autumn 2004, p. 3-22

6 For example: Rocha , João. Kim Jong Il Looking at Things , Paris: Jean Boîte, 2012

7 Place, Vanessa. Tragodia 1: Statement of Facts , Los Angeles: Insert Blanc Press, 2011

3 franck leibovici’s essay, Des opérations d’écriture qui ne disent pas leur nom, should be read in the same light, through the lens of the literature of the banal , documents, and experimental writing. Through the appropriationist and performing “Goldsmith case”, leibovici re-examines this figure, which materialises a salient dimension of current (non)creativity. The essay is permeated with the presence of the technological gestures and picto-verbal habits that we have acquired over the course of the past decades through the use of screens, digital environments and personal computers. Social and scriptural practices combining texts and images have therefore entered what the theoretician of images W.J.T. Mitchell referred to in 1994 as a “pictorial turn” 4 . W.J.T. Mitchell emphasised the pre-eminence of the culture of images in a connected world, as well as reproducibility technologies. On a broader scale, he questioned the interpretative relationship between reality and language in connection to images, to which franck leibovici added their status as document. This represents an additional influence exerted by the relationships between art and writing and art and literature, towards including the “documental” status and the aesthetics of archives – whose growth Hal Foster noted in the 2000s. 5 Appropriationist practices are essentially based on the displacement of writing materials and their production contexts, through minimal modifications akin to furtiveness and the infra-thin. Following this logic, one should track down poetic manifestations in “covert writing operations”[ opérations d’écriture qui ne disent par leur nom ], because they have become transparent and discarnate: image compilations 6 , samplings, content curating (which expands curatorial activities), text republications (such as Statements of Facts , legal hearings read in public) 7 and even tagging, to name but a few of the examples whose effects on literary imagination are analysed by leibovici.

4 The reusing of documents – or archives – has been illustrated for several years by the œuvre of Valérie Mréjen. After having worked with the documentary form and the montage of stereotypical texts, she used postcard pictures to which she combined fragments of correspondences that recount, by lacunar touches, relationships and small everyday events. The catalogue of her exhibition, Soustraction , which took place at the IMEC [Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine] in 2019, brings together the montage of fictional documentaries from vernacular pictures and archival objects which belonged to thinkers, writers and critics included in the institute’s collection. Soustraction , therefore, is simultaneously an artist/writer exhibition, a series of works made from “documental” archives, and a poetic meditation on these insignificant objects: notebooks, calling cards, transport tickets and personal photographs, whose common gesture is to reframe a detail, an extraction.

• 8 The Book Lovers , a curatorial project launched by David Maroto and Joanna Zielińska, is a collectio (...)

5 These theoretical concerns go hand in hand with the growth of literary and visual productions at the intersection of the arts, which partakes in the current demands for the recognition of an artist/author status. The performative turn in literature and art, in the sense of the artistic performance, does indeed indeterminate the role of poetic creators and artist/authors. The old debate, which one would already come across at the time of photographie plasticienne , and which was materialised by the exhibition Ils se disent peintres, ils se disent photographes (22 November-4 January 1981), merges with the issues of artistic literature, a literary practice which claims and endorses the visual forms of its creation process, in books or elsewhere. Similarly, artists have accompanied their works with texts for a long time –Jean-Marc Poinsot identified them as “authorised narratives” –, or have even made the texts part of the works themselves. The ambiguity obviously lies in the quantity of texts produced and their status. Contemporary artists precisely use this irresoluteness to perform textual productions in many variations, as exemplified by the musical and sound productions by Art & Language and Dominique Petitgand; John Giorno and Ed Ruscha’s visual poems, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s fictional matrixes, the narrated performances by Tris Vonna-Michell and duo Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet, as well as the many films and videos that imply narration. Other artists publish their texts, and their novels can even become the subject of exhibitions. 8 Recently, these publications have followed the path of experimental literature and alternative editions, which eschew a unique format in order to adapt to the needs of the “performance” of the textual contents on walls, screens or stages.

9 Béatrice Cussol : eponym e , Nantes: Amac, 2019

6 However, to imagine systematic valences between literature and art would be simplistic, since critical entry points as well as genres and forms are far from homogeneous, as Béatrice Cussol’s literary and graphic work demonstrates. Her latest text, Ecrire ou partir , published by the Printemps de septembre, came out at the same time as a monograph catalogue, Eponym e , which focuses on her paintings. 9 An artist and a writer, she divides her work into distinct spaces which do, however, echo each other. In Ecrire ou partir , a narrative and experimental work, her prose is perceptibly influenced by Monique Wittig and the text is built on associations, shifts, overflowing and closures. In the same way, the vulva matrixes she represents in her drawings are deformed and reformed in order to compose impossible, strange and dream-like characters, dominated by a perceptible yet formless female presence, as in her writings. Through the “un-objective space” defined by Annie Le Brun, the connections between these productions, which are so similar in their creation processes, yet visually so distinct, can be achieved and made sense of, although they are neither absolute nor obvious. To enter the folds of this aesthetics that is clarified by degrees, it is helpful to make a detour through the works of other artists, such as Ida Applebroog and Georgia O’Keeffe, and writers – Violette Leduc and Kathy Acker –, in order to develop, through constellations and networks of concordances, a synthetical reception of dissociated experiences. David Shrigley’s book, in the same series, delivers an account of a musical experiment which, like a performance archive, is remediated in the book. The work reproduces the lyrics from thirty-one songs he made a gift of to musicians, who would then perform them with instruments that had been especially designed for a 2016 Printemps de septembre project in Toulouse. Problem in Toulouse is a rendering of this performance as well as a poetry book, with texts to be sung for oneself or to be freely reconstituted. These experiments, like a gift for future creativity, demonstrate the flowering of literature within visual arts and vice versa , like a crossed graft bearing hybrid fruit.

1 Vouilloux, Bernard. Le Tournant «  artiste » de la littérature française : écrire avec la peinture au XIXe siècle , Paris: Hermann, 2011, (Savoir Lettres)

4 Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994

8 The Book Lovers , a curatorial project launched by David Maroto and Joanna Zielińska, is a collection of artist narratives that is regularly exhibited, for example at the Frac Franche-Comté during Montag ou la bibliothèque à venir (15 October 2017-14 January 2018).

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier.

Magali Nachtergael , «  Contemporary Art and Literature: Post-conceptualism, “documentality” and creative grafts  », Critique d’art , 54 | 2020, 22-33.

Référence électronique

Magali Nachtergael , «  Contemporary Art and Literature: Post-conceptualism, “documentality” and creative grafts  », Critique d’art [En ligne], 54 | Printemps/été 2020, mis en ligne le 04 juin 2021, consulté le 17 juin 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/61997 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.61997

Magali Nachtergael

Magali Nachtergael is a lecturer in Literature and Contemporary art at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University since 2010. She has published Les Mythologies individuelles , récit de soi et photographie au 20e siècle (Rodopi; Brill, 2012), Roland Barthes contemporain (Max Milo; Frac Aquitaine, 2015) and Danse contemporaine et littérature (Centre national de la danse, 2015) edited with Lucille Toth. Her upcoming book, Poet Against the Machine focuses on creative human-technology interactions and will be published in October 2020 by Le Mot et le reste. She is also a curator (Frac Aquitaine, Seoul Museum of Art, Rencontres d’Arles) and an art critic.

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Hardcover ISBN: 9780804729727 Paperback ISBN: 9780804729734

Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collection of his writings on art and literature. These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects, in chronological order beginning with his first published analysis of a work of literature, the 1907 "Delusion and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva " and concluding with the 1940 posthumous publication of "Medusa's Head." Many of the essays included in this collection have been crucial in contemporary literary and art criticism and theory.

Among the subjects Freud engages are Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth, Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Michelangelo's Moses, E. T. A. Hoffman's "The Sand Man," Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, fairy tales, the effect of and the meaning of beauty, mythology, and the games of aestheticization. All texts are drawn from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , edited by James Strachey. The volume includes the notes prepared for that edition by the editor.

In addition to the writings on Jensen's Gradiva and Medusa, the essays are: "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage," "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," "The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales," "The Theme of the Three Caskets," "The Moses of Michelangelo," "Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work," "On Transience," "A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession," "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit," "The Uncanny," "Dostoevsky and Parricide," and "The Goethe Prize."

About the authors

“These are classic essays, referred to over and over again in work of all sorts, widely read, and extensively used in courses. But until now they have not been collected in English. The choice of essays is excellent, covering the whole chronological range of Freud’s writings on art and literature.”—J. Hillis Miller,University of California, Irvine.

Edited by Max Saunders and Lisa Gee

Styles of Seriousness

Steven Connor

Translating the Jewish Freud

Naomi Seidman

Of Effacement

David Marriott

The Sociology of Literature

Gisèle Sapiro, Translated by Madeline Bedecarré and Ben Libman

Bruce Robbins

Programming Language Cultures

Brian Lennon

The Arts of Logistics

Michael Shane Boyle

Refiguring Speech

Amy R. Wong

The Grounds of the Novel

Daniel Wright

Common Measures

Joseph Albernaz

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Literature and Literacy

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Literature is any body of written works and typically refers to writing considered to be an art form or any single writing deemed to have artistic or intellectual value, often due to deploying language in ways that differ from ordinary usage.

Thumbnail: Old book bindings at the Merton College library. (CC BY-SA 3.0; Tom Murphy VII )

Literary Analysis Essay

Literary Analysis Essay Writing

Last updated on: May 21, 2023

Literary Analysis Essay - Ultimate Guide By Professionals

By: Cordon J.

Reviewed By: Rylee W.

Published on: Dec 3, 2019

A literary analysis essay specifically examines and evaluates a piece of literature or a literary work. It also understands and explains the links between the small parts to their whole information.

It is important for students to understand the meaning and the true essence of literature to write a literary essay.

One of the most difficult assignments for students is writing a literary analysis essay. It can be hard to come up with an original idea or find enough material to write about. You might think you need years of experience in order to create a good paper, but that's not true.

This blog post will show you how easy it can be when you follow the steps given here.Writing such an essay involves the breakdown of a book into small parts and understanding each part separately. It seems easy, right?

Trust us, it is not as hard as good book reports but it may also not be extremely easy. You will have to take into account different approaches and explain them in relation with the chosen literary work.

It is a common high school and college assignment and you can learn everything in this blog.

Continue reading for some useful tips with an example to write a literary analysis essay that will be on point. You can also explore our detailed article on writing an analytical essay .

On this Page

What is a Literary Analysis Essay?

A literary analysis essay is an important kind of essay that focuses on the detailed analysis of the work of literature.

The purpose of a literary analysis essay is to explain why the author has used a specific theme for his work. Or examine the characters, themes, literary devices , figurative language, and settings in the story.

This type of essay encourages students to think about how the book or the short story has been written. And why the author has created this work.

The method used in the literary analysis essay differs from other types of essays. It primarily focuses on the type of work and literature that is being analyzed.

Mostly, you will be going to break down the work into various parts. In order to develop a better understanding of the idea being discussed, each part will be discussed separately.

The essay should explain the choices of the author and point of view along with your answers and personal analysis.

How To Write A Literary Analysis Essay

So how to start a literary analysis essay? The answer to this question is quite simple.

The following sections are required to write an effective literary analysis essay. By following the guidelines given in the following sections, you will be able to craft a winning literary analysis essay.

Introduction

The aim of the introduction is to establish a context for readers. You have to give a brief on the background of the selected topic.

It should contain the name of the author of the literary work along with its title. The introduction should be effective enough to grab the reader’s attention.

In the body section, you have to retell the story that the writer has narrated. It is a good idea to create a summary as it is one of the important tips of literary analysis.

Other than that, you are required to develop ideas and disclose the observed information related to the issue. The ideal length of the body section is around 1000 words.

To write the body section, your observation should be based on evidence and your own style of writing.

It would be great if the body of your essay is divided into three paragraphs. Make a strong argument with facts related to the thesis statement in all of the paragraphs in the body section.

Start writing each paragraph with a topic sentence and use transition words when moving to the next paragraph.

Summarize the important points of your literary analysis essay in this section. It is important to compose a short and strong conclusion to help you make a final impression of your essay.

Pay attention that this section does not contain any new information. It should provide a sense of completion by restating the main idea with a short description of your arguments. End the conclusion with your supporting details.

You have to explain why the book is important. Also, elaborate on the means that the authors used to convey her/his opinion regarding the issue.

For further understanding, here is a downloadable literary analysis essay outline. This outline will help you structure and format your essay properly and earn an A easily.

DOWNLOADABLE LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY OUTLINE (PDF)

Types of Literary Analysis Essay

• Close reading - This method involves attentive reading and detailed analysis. No need for a lot of knowledge and inspiration to write an essay that shows your creative skills.
• Theoretical - In this type, you will rely on theories related to the selected topic.
• Historical - This type of essay concerns the discipline of history. Sometimes historical analysis is required to explain events in detail.
• Applied - This type involves analysis of a specific issue from a practical perspective.
• Comparative - This type of writing is based on when two or more alternatives are compared

Examples of Literary Analysis Essay

Examples are great to understand any concept, especially if it is related to writing. Below are some great literary analysis essay examples that showcase how this type of essay is written.

A ROSE FOR EMILY LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

THE GREAT GATSBY LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY

If you do not have experience in writing essays, this will be a very chaotic process for you. In that case, it is very important for you to conduct good research on the topic before writing.

There are two important points that you should keep in mind when writing a literary analysis essay.

First, remember that it is very important to select a topic in which you are interested. Choose something that really inspires you. This will help you to catch the attention of a reader.

The selected topic should reflect the main idea of writing. In addition to that, it should also express your point of view as well.

Another important thing is to draft a good outline for your literary analysis essay. It will help you to define a central point and division of this into parts for further discussion.

Literary Analysis Essay Topics

Literary analysis essays are mostly based on artistic works like books, movies, paintings, and other forms of art. However, generally, students choose novels and books to write their literary essays.

Some cool, fresh, and good topics and ideas are listed below:

• Role of the Three Witches in flaming Macbeth’s ambition.
• Analyze the themes of the Play Antigone,
• Discuss Ajax as a tragic hero.
• The Judgement of Paris: Analyze the Reasons and their Consequences.
• Oedipus Rex: A Doomed Son or a Conqueror?
• Describe the Oedipus complex and Electra complex in relation to their respective myths.
• Betrayal is a common theme of Shakespearean tragedies. Discuss
• Identify and analyze the traits of history in T.S Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’.
• Analyze the theme of identity crisis in The Great Gatsby.
• Analyze the writing style of Emily Dickinson.

If you are still in doubt then there is nothing bad in getting professional writers’ help.

We at 5StarEssays.com can help you get a custom paper as per your specified requirements with our do essay for me service.

Our essay writers will help you write outstanding literary essays or any other type of essay. Such as compare and contrast essays, descriptive essays, rhetorical essays. We cover all of these.

So don’t waste your time browsing the internet and place your order now to get your well-written custom paper.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should a literary analysis essay include.

A good literary analysis essay must include a proper and in-depth explanation of your ideas. They must be backed with examples and evidence from the text. Textual evidence includes summaries, paraphrased text, original work details, and direct quotes.

What are the 4 components of literary analysis?

Here are the 4 essential parts of a literary analysis essay;

No literary work is explained properly without discussing and explaining these 4 things.

How do you start a literary analysis essay?

Start your literary analysis essay with the name of the work and the title. Hook your readers by introducing the main ideas that you will discuss in your essay and engage them from the start.

How do you do a literary analysis?

In a literary analysis essay, you study the text closely, understand and interpret its meanings. And try to find out the reasons behind why the author has used certain symbols, themes, and objects in the work.

Why is literary analysis important?

It encourages the students to think beyond their existing knowledge, experiences, and belief and build empathy. This helps in improving the writing skills also.

What is the fundamental characteristic of a literary analysis essay?

Interpretation is the fundamental and important feature of a literary analysis essay. The essay is based on how well the writer explains and interprets the work.

Law, Finance Essay

Cordon. is a published author and writing specialist. He has worked in the publishing industry for many years, providing writing services and digital content. His own writing career began with a focus on literature and linguistics, which he continues to pursue. Cordon is an engaging and professional individual, always looking to help others achieve their goals.

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Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in art, literature, and music

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This interdisciplinary collection of essays investigates the concept of ‘late style’ as a category for addressing art, literature, and music produced either in old age or in the proximity of death. The volume interrogates the assumptions that underpin the idea of ‘late style’ by way of a critical, comparative examination of the genealogy and philosophical and psychological underpinnings of the concept, and by analysing case studies of writers, artists, and composers to whom a ‘late period’ has been attributed. These include Austen, Beethoven, Darwin, Goethe, Hamburger, Lawrence, Monet, Mann, Nietszche, Oppen, Picasso, Ravel, Rossini, Schubert, Shakespeare, and Titian. Together, the contributors—who include leading art historians, literary critics, and musicologists—raise key questions about ‘late style’ as a category, and work towards a taxonomy of lateness that can adequately encompass the range of possibilities grouped under the general heading ‘late’. In the process—and in many cases by assessing the accounts of lateness by Theodor Adorno and his disciple Edward Said—they reflect on the extent to which lateness is a modern category, one that both highlights and obscures the nature of modernity. The essays together suggest that it is impossible to read late style as a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon; rather, late style is an idea that is, like all such critical constructs, contingent, complicit, and culturally invested; it has emerged from the history of the idea of ‘genius’ and persists in shaping the way in which we view the relationship between old age and creativity.

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Beauty and aesthetics

All aquiver

The Decadent movement taught that you should live your life with the greatest intensity – a dangerous and thrilling challenge

Stories and literature

To capture grief in poetry is to describe the ineffable. Here’s why Tennyson did it best

Ageing and death

Peregrinations of grief

A friend and a falcon went missing. In pain, I turned to ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ – and found a new vision of sorrow and time

Animals and humans

Why be dragons? How massive, reptilian beasts entered our collective imagination

Her blazing world

Margaret Cavendish’s boldness and bravery set 17th-century society alight, but is she a feminist poster-girl for our times?

Francesca Peacock

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

Shachar Pinsker

Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone

Do liberal arts liberate?

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life

Terrifying vistas of reality

H P Lovecraft, the master of cosmic horror stories, was a philosopher who believed in the total insignificance of humanity

Sam Woodward

The real Miss Julie

Victoria Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her own life. Then Strindberg stole it

Elisabeth Åsbrink

Comparative philosophy

Folklore is philosophy

Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world

Abigail Tulenko

There was no Jesus

How could a cult leader draw crowds, inspire devotion and die by crucifixion, yet leave no mark in contemporary records?

Gavin Evans

The best stories smell

When scents are used to intensify a narrative, they heighten young readers’ emotions and enrich their memory banks

Natalia Kucirkova

Saved by Infinite Jest

Bereft and suicidal, I lay on my sofa. Only David Foster Wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does

Mala Chatterjee

Devon, 1970s: I’m a rector’s son, hanging out with Boz the biker. My life is about to open up – what does it promise for him?

A French Creole folktale nearly lost to time is given new, gorgeously animated life

Mood and emotion

Moments of poetry pierce through the mundane at a small-town grocery

Vergil’s secret message

Long derided as mere coincidences, acrostics in ancient poetry are finally being taken seriously – with astonishing results

Julia Hejduk

Philosophy of language

Quantum poetics

How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality

William Egginton

Human rights and justice

Beyond obscenity

A century after the trial against ‘Ulysses’, we must revisit the civil liberties arguments of its defender, Morris Ernst

Myths from Earth’s edge – what the Icelandic sagas reveal about Norse morality

Poet of impermanence

Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times

Sophus Helle

Solace and saudade

In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon

Jonardon Ganeri & Sarah Seymour

The diaries of Kafka

By day an insurance official, by night he was an incessant, insomniacal scribe of the space between waking and dreaming

Ross Benjamin

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Literature and Art

2007, French Studies: Special Issue: The Nineteenth-Century Art Novel

This special issue of French Studies examines a body of narratives featuring French art and artists published at representative periods during the nineteenth century (in both French and English). There are strong thematic continuities between many of the examples discussed, particularly as regards their concern over the social and economic position of the artist, and the nature and gendering of creativity. The topoi of the genius and the raté also recur throughout. Several texts are vehicles for voicing aesthetic and political positions. And many draw closely on contemporary figures, events, and debates for their content. Yet this special issue does not aim to identify a discursive unity so much as to exhibit the variety and richness of the art novel's evolution. It is also concerned to address some of the methodological issues involved in reading this kind of text, including the selectivity of the canon, intertextual connections, and the relationship between fiction and fact. It is hoped it will not only plot some new and unfamiliar material in an area still represented for most by a mere handful of 'major' texts, but also bring some of the questions involved by this expanded configuration of the field into sharper focus.

Related Papers

Sabrina Wengier

Emilie Sitzia

Érika Wicky

Painting material as a boundary of ekphrasis in art novels of the 19th century. In the 19th century, an increasing degree of autonomy in the visual arts and the claims laid by painters on the materials used in their artwork fundamentally modified the relationship between painting and literature. While academic painting still called for smooth and transparent paintings that were perceived as an "open window" onto the world, modern painting started to build up extra layers of paint, showing off relief and textural effects a trend that caused the tactile to invade the visual. Authors of ekphrases were confronted with the following question : how to describe painting material whereas it represents nothing ? The analysis of the status given to painting materials in art novels suggests that it is the Achilles' heel of their ambition for realism. Nevertheless, the boundary could be crossed by intensifying the reflexivity that effectuated a shift in the relationship between painting and literature. Thus, authors gave up trying to describe the reality as if it were a painting and opted to treat it the same way a painter would do it, by handling their own primary materials.

Alexandra Vranceanu Pagliardini

Les études sur les rapports entre le visuel et la littérature devraient enregistrer une nouvelle forme de récit à succès, le récit qui s’inspire des œuvres d’art. Je m’arrêterai sur deux romans récents qui s’inspirent des tableaux de Manet, l’Olympia et Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Régis Descott, Obscura, VR Main, A Woman With No Clothes On. Ces deux écrivains décrivent, analysent et expliquent les énigmatiques peintures de Manet, ils transforment les personnages peints en personnages littéraires et inventent une histoire qui fait semblant d’expliquer le tableau. Je mettrai en parallèle ces deux lectures narratives des tableaux de Manet pour montrer comment les écrivains utilisent les images pour inventer des récits.

Evert van Uitert

Matthias Krüger

The writings on photography published during the 1850s reveal the emergence of a pictorial imaginary of photographic matter in the margins of the amazement at a medium completely dominated by nature and the precise developments of the technique of photography. In some of these texts, photographers were likened to painters because of the application, in both techniques, of multiple layers of varied and more or less opaque substances. Inasmuch as it concerned the process of fabrication more than the image itself, the understanding of the work performed by photographers, of their action on matter, directly affected their social status. To reflect on the material imaginary of photography is then to interrogate the modalities of the joint emergence of the profession and of the figure of the photographer-artist at the very moment of the industrialization of photography. Les écrits sur la photographie publiés dans les années 1850 témoignent des conceptions et représentations auxquelles a donné lieu l’apparition du médium photographique dans la culture visuelle. En marge de l’émerveillement pour un médium entièrement dominé par la nature ou des développements précis sur la technique photographique, on y voit se dessiner un imaginaire pictural de la matière photographique. Dans certains textes, la figure du photographe se trouve apparentée à celle du peintre en raison de l’application, dans leurs techniques respectives, de couches multiples de substances variées plus ou moins opaques. Dans la mesure où elles concernent moins l’image elle-même que son processus de fabrication, les conceptions du travail effectué par le photographe, de son action sur la matière, affectent directement le statut social du praticien. S’interroger sur l’imaginaire matériel de la photographie revient alors à questionner les modalités de l’émergence conjointe d’un métier et d’une figure de l’artiste photographe au moment où la pratique de la photographie s’industrialise.

Laurence Brogniez

Reena Khanna

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Writing in Literature

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

In this section

Subsections.

• Literary Terms
• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Write an Essay

I. What is an Essay?

An essay is a form of writing in paragraph form that uses informal language, although it can be written formally. Essays may be written in first-person point of view (I, ours, mine), but third-person (people, he, she) is preferable in most academic essays. Essays do not require research as most academic reports and papers do; however, they should cite any literary works that are used within the paper.

When thinking of essays, we normally think of the five-paragraph essay: Paragraph 1 is the introduction, paragraphs 2-4 are the body covering three main ideas, and paragraph 5 is the conclusion. Sixth and seventh graders may start out with three paragraph essays in order to learn the concepts. However, essays may be longer than five paragraphs. Essays are easier and quicker to read than books, so are a preferred way to express ideas and concepts when bringing them to public attention.

II. Examples of Essays

Many of our most famous Americans have written essays. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson wrote essays about being good citizens and concepts to build the new United States. In the pre-Civil War days of the 1800s, people such as:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (an author) wrote essays on self-improvement
• Susan B. Anthony wrote on women’s right to vote
• Frederick Douglass wrote on the issue of African Americans’ future in the U.S.

Through each era of American history, well-known figures in areas such as politics, literature, the arts, business, etc., voiced their opinions through short and long essays.

The ultimate persuasive essay that most students learn about and read in social studies is the “Declaration of Independence” by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Other founding fathers edited and critiqued it, but he drafted the first version. He builds a strong argument by stating his premise (claim) then proceeds to give the evidence in a straightforward manner before coming to his logical conclusion.

III. Types of Essays

A. expository.

Essays written to explore and explain ideas are called expository essays (they expose truths). These will be more formal types of essays usually written in third person, to be more objective. There are many forms, each one having its own organizational pattern.  Cause/Effect essays explain the reason (cause) for something that happens after (effect). Definition essays define an idea or concept. Compare/ Contrast essays will look at two items and show how they are similar (compare) and different (contrast).

b. Persuasive

An argumentative paper presents an idea or concept with the intention of attempting to change a reader’s mind or actions . These may be written in second person, using “you” in order to speak to the reader. This is called a persuasive essay. There will be a premise (claim) followed by evidence to show why you should believe the claim.

c. Narrative

Narrative means story, so narrative essays will illustrate and describe an event of some kind to tell a story. Most times, they will be written in first person. The writer will use descriptive terms, and may have paragraphs that tell a beginning, middle, and end in place of the five paragraphs with introduction, body, and conclusion. However, if there is a lesson to be learned, a five-paragraph may be used to ensure the lesson is shown.

d. Descriptive

The goal of a descriptive essay is to vividly describe an event, item, place, memory, etc. This essay may be written in any point of view, depending on what’s being described. There is a lot of freedom of language in descriptive essays, which can include figurative language, as well.

IV. The Importance of Essays

Essays are an important piece of literature that can be used in a variety of situations. They’re a flexible type of writing, which makes them useful in many settings . History can be traced and understood through essays from theorists, leaders, artists of various arts, and regular citizens of countries throughout the world and time. For students, learning to write essays is also important because as they leave school and enter college and/or the work force, it is vital for them to be able to express themselves well.

V. Examples of Essays in Literature

Sir Francis Bacon was a leading philosopher who influenced the colonies in the 1600s. Many of America’s founding fathers also favored his philosophies toward government. Bacon wrote an essay titled “Of Nobility” in 1601 , in which he defines the concept of nobility in relation to people and government. The following is the introduction of his definition essay. Note the use of “we” for his point of view, which includes his readers while still sounding rather formal.

 “We will speak of nobility, first as a portion of an estate, then as a condition of particular persons. A monarchy, where there is no nobility at all, is ever a pure and absolute tyranny; as that of the Turks. For nobility attempers sovereignty, and draws the eyes of the people, somewhat aside from the line royal. But for democracies, they need it not; and they are commonly more quiet, and less subject to sedition, than where there are stirps of nobles. For men’s eyes are upon the business, and not upon the persons; or if upon the persons, it is for the business’ sake, as fittest, and not for flags and pedigree. We see the Switzers last well, notwithstanding their diversity of religion, and of cantons. For utility is their bond, and not respects. The united provinces of the Low Countries, in their government, excel; for where there is an equality, the consultations are more indifferent, and the payments and tributes, more cheerful. A great and potent nobility, addeth majesty to a monarch, but diminisheth power; and putteth life and spirit into the people, but presseth their fortune. It is well, when nobles are not too great for sovereignty nor for justice; and yet maintained in that height, as the insolency of inferiors may be broken upon them, before it come on too fast upon the majesty of kings. A numerous nobility causeth poverty, and inconvenience in a state; for it is a surcharge of expense; and besides, it being of necessity, that many of the nobility fall, in time, to be weak in fortune, it maketh a kind of disproportion, between honor and means.”

A popular modern day essayist is Barbara Kingsolver. Her book, “Small Wonders,” is full of essays describing her thoughts and experiences both at home and around the world. Her intention with her essays is to make her readers think about various social issues, mainly concerning the environment and how people treat each other. The link below is to an essay in which a child in an Iranian village she visited had disappeared. The boy was found three days later in a bear’s cave, alive and well, protected by a mother bear. She uses a narrative essay to tell her story.

VI. Examples of Essays in Pop Culture

Many rap songs are basically mini essays, expressing outrage and sorrow over social issues today, just as the 1960s had a lot of anti-war and peace songs that told stories and described social problems of that time. Any good song writer will pay attention to current events and express ideas in a creative way.

A well-known essay written in 1997 by Mary Schmich, a columnist with the Chicago Tribune, was made into a popular video on MTV by Baz Luhrmann. Schmich’s thesis is to wear sunscreen, but she adds strong advice with supporting details throughout the body of her essay, reverting to her thesis in the conclusion.

VII. Related Terms

Research paper.

Research papers follow the same basic format of an essay. They have an introductory paragraph, the body, and a conclusion. However, research papers have strict guidelines regarding a title page, header, sub-headers within the paper, citations throughout and in a bibliography page, the size and type of font, and margins. The purpose of a research paper is to explore an area by looking at previous research. Some research papers may include additional studies by the author, which would then be compared to previous research. The point of view is an objective third-person. No opinion is allowed. Any claims must be backed up with research.

VIII. Conclusion

Students dread hearing that they are going to write an essay, but essays are one of the easiest and most relaxed types of writing they will learn. Mastering the essay will make research papers much easier, since they have the same basic structure. Many historical events can be better understood through essays written by people involved in those times. The continuation of essays in today’s times will allow future historians to understand how our new world of technology and information impacted us.

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
• Antonomasia
• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

The Art of Literature

THE ART OF LITERATURE

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Vitam impendere vero .— Juvenal

SELECTED AND TRANSLATED

WITH A PREFACE BY

T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M.A.

LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., Lim. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. 1897.

First Edition, March 1891: Second Edition, January 1892: Third Edition, March 1897.

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The Mathematician Who Finds the Poetry in Math and the Math in Poetry

January 12, 2024

Philipp Ammon for Quanta Magazine

Introduction

Sarah Hart has always had an eye for the covert ways mathematics permeates other fields. As a child, she was struck by the ubiquity of the number 3 in her fairy tales. Hart’s mother, a math teacher, encouraged her pattern-seeking, giving her math puzzles to pass the time.

Hart went on to earn a doctorate in group theory in 2000 and later became a professor at Birkbeck, University of London. Hart’s research probed the structure of Coxeter groups, more general versions of structures that catalog the symmetries of polygons and prisms. In 2023, she published Once Upon a Prime , a book about the ways math appears in fiction and poetry. “Since we humans are part of the universe, it is only natural that our forms of creative expression, literature among them, will also manifest an inclination for pattern and structure,” Hart wrote. “Mathematics, then, is the key to an entirely different perspective on literature.”

Since 2020, Hart has been the professor of geometry at Gresham College in London. Gresham has no traditional courses; instead, its professors each deliver several public lectures per year. Hart is the first woman to ever hold the 428-year-old position, which was occupied in the 17th century by Isaac Barrow, famous for teaching another Isaac (Newton). More recently, it was held by Roger Penrose, a mathematician who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. Hart spoke with Quanta about how mathematics and art influence one another. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why did you choose to write your book about the links between math and literature?

These links are less explored and less known than those between math and, say, music. The connections between mathematics and music have been celebrated since at least as far back as the Pythagoreans. However, though there has been writing and academic research about specific books, authors or genres, I hadn’t seen a book for a general audience about the broader connections between mathematics and literature.

Video : Sarah Hart, the professor of geometry at Gresham College, sees symmetry everywhere.

Video: Christopher Webb Young and Emily Buder/ Quanta Magazine ; Photo: Philipp Ammon for Quanta Magazine

How should people in the arts think about math?

There’s a lot of common ground between mathematics and, shall I say, the other arts. In literature, as well as music and art, you don’t ever start with nothing at all. If you’re a poet, you are choosing: Will I have a haiku with its very precise numerical constraints, or will I write a sonnet which has a certain number of lines, a certain rhyme scheme, a certain meter? Even something that doesn’t have a rhyme scheme will have line breaks, a rhythm. There will be constraints that inspire creativity, that help to focus you.

In mathematics, we have the same thing. We have some ground rules. Within that, we can explore, we can play, and we can prove theorems. What mathematics can do for the arts is help find new structures, show what the possibilities are. What would a piece of music look like that doesn’t have a key signature? We can think about the 12 tones and arranging them differently, and here are all the ways you can do that. Here are different color schemes you can devise, here are different forms of poetic meter.

What’s one example of how math has been affected by literature?

Thousands of years ago in India, poets were trying to think about the possible meters. In Sanskrit poetry, you have long and short syllables. Long is twice as long as short. If you want to work out how many there are that take a length of time of three, you can have short, short, short, or long, short, or short, long. There are three ways to make three. There are five ways to make a length-four phrase. And there are eight ways to make a length-five phrase. This sequence you’re getting is one where every term is the sum of the previous two. You exactly reproduce what we nowadays call the Fibonacci sequence. But this was centuries before Fibonacci.

Hart is interested in the mathematical language found on this Babylonian cuneiform tablet, one of the earliest records of humans doing math.

How about math’s influence on literature?

A quite simple sequence, but it works very, very powerfully, is Eleanor Catton’s book The Luminaries , which came out in 2013. She used the sequence that goes 1,1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16. Every chapter in that book is half the length of the one before. It creates this really fascinating effect, because the pace is picking up, and the characters’ choices are being more constrained. Everything hurtles toward its conclusion. By the end, the chapters are extremely short.

Another example of a slightly more complicated mathematical structure is what’s called orthogonal Latin squares. A Latin square is kind of like a sudoku grid. In this case, it’d be a 10-by-10 grid. Every number appears exactly once in each row and in each column. Orthogonal Latin squares are formed by overlaying two Latin squares so there is a pair of numbers in each space. The grid formed by the first number in each pair is a Latin square, and so is the grid formed by the second number in each pair. Furthermore, in the grid of pairs, no pair appears more than once.

These are very useful in all sorts of ways. You can make error-correcting codes out of them, which are useful for sending messages along kind of noisy channels. But one of the great things about these particular ones, size 10, is that one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Leonhard Euler, thought they couldn’t exist. It was one of the very few times when he made a mistake; that’s why it was so exciting. A long time after he made this conjecture that these things couldn’t exist for particular sizes, it was refuted, and squares of this size were found in 1959. It was on the cover of Scientific American that year.

Hart has been making mathematical patterns since she was a young child.

Years after that, a French writer, Georges Perec, was looking for a structure to use for his book Life: A User’s Manual . He chose one of these orthogonal Latin squares. He set his book in a Paris apartment block, which had 100 rooms, a 10-by-10 square. Every chapter was in a different room, and every chapter had its unique flavor. He had lists of 10 things — various fabrics, colors, that kind of thing. Every chapter would use a unique combination. It’s a really fascinating way to structure the book.

You clearly value good writing. What do you think of the quality of writing in math research papers?

It’s very variable! I know we prize brevity, but I think sometimes that is taken too far. There are too many papers that don’t have any useful examples.

What we actually prize is an ingenious argument that, because it covers all the cases at once so cleverly, is also brief and elegant. That is not the same as squashing your long argument into a smaller space than it needs by covering the page with arcane sigils that you’ve created to make the notation briefer, but which not only the reader but probably you yourself will have to unpack laboriously again in order to make any sense of what’s going on.

We don’t give enough thought to helpful notation which reminds the reader what is meant. The right notation can absolutely transform a piece of mathematics, and can make space for generalizations as well. Think of the transition, historically, from writing an unknown, its square and its cube with three different letters, and how much more likely, and even possible, it is to start thinking about  when you have started writing ,  and  instead.

Hart works from her home office, which sits in her back garden.

Do you see evolution in the links between math and art?

There are new things all the time. Fractals were everywhere in the 1990s. On every student dorm room wall, there was a picture of the Mandelbrot set or something like this. Everyone was like, “Oh, this is exciting, fractals.” You get, for example, musicians, composers, who are using fractal sequences in their compositions.

When I was about 16, there were these new things called graphics calculators. Very exciting. And a friend of my mother’s gave me this program that could draw a Mandelbrot set on one of these little graphics calculators. It had about, I don’t know, 200 pixels. You program this thing in, and then I had to leave it for 12 hours. It would plot these 200 points at the end of it. So even mere schoolchildren could engage with this in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and produce these pictures for themselves.

Even when you were in school, you were already very interested in hardcore math, it sounds like.

  I think I’ve been interested since before I even knew that meant I was mathematical. Like, I just always was making patterns from when I was a tiny, weeny child.

When I was quite little, my favorite toy was some very simple wooden painted tiles. They came in all different colors. I would make them into patterns, and then I’d look at it proudly for a day or so, and then I’d make another one.

Hart with her bird, Coco, at her home in northeast London.

When I got a bit older, I would play with numbers and look at patterns. Mum would be the one I would go to and say, “I’m bored.” And then she’d say, “Well, can you work out what the pattern is of the number of points you need to make a triangle?” or whatever it was. She’d have me rediscover the triangular numbers or something, and I’d be very excited.

My poor mother, the number of amazing inventions that I would go to my mother with. “I’ve developed a whole new way of doing something!” And she’d say, “OK, that’s very nice. But, you know, Descartes thought of that centuries ago.” And then off I’d go; I’d come up with another amazing idea a few days later. “That’s lovely, dear. But the ancient Greeks had that one.”

Do you recall any particularly satisfying moments from your math research career?

The moments when you finally understand what the pattern is that you are seeing is always satisfying, as well as when you work out how to complete a proof you’ve been wrestling with. My strongest memories of those feelings of delight, probably because they were the first times I’d felt them, are from the start of my research career. But it’s still a lovely feeling to get that “aha,” when you finally understand what’s going on.

Very early on I was trying to prove something about infinite Coxeter groups. I’d resolved some of the cases, and in looking at the rest I came up with a technique that would work if a specific criterion was satisfied. You can write these relationships in a graph, so I started putting together a collection of the graphs for which my technique could be applied. This was over Christmas one year.

“Doing mathematics feels like discovery,” Hart said. “If we were inventing the mathematics, it surely wouldn’t be so hard to prove things! Sometimes we desperately want something to be true, and it isn’t.”

After a while, my set of pictures started to look like a particular set of graphs that were listed in a book about Coxeter groups that was in my office, and I began to hope that it was this exact set of graphs. If it was, then that would fill in the hole in my proof, and my theorem would be finished. But I couldn’t check for sure until I got back into the university after Christmas — this was before you could just Google everything. I think the anticipation of having to wait to confirm my hunch made it even better when I got to the book and compared my handwritten set of diagrams with the ones in the book, and they were indeed a match.

What do you think about the question of whether math is created or discovered? Almost nobody would argue that any of the novelists you write about in your book “discovered” their novels. Is this a fundamental difference between math and literature or not?

It probably is, though there are still some resonances.

Doing mathematics feels like discovery. If we were inventing the mathematics, it surely wouldn’t be so hard to prove things! Sometimes we desperately want something to be true, and it isn’t. We can’t avoid the consequences of logic, I suppose.

It all feels like discovery when you are doing it. Some choices mirror what we experience in the real world, like the axioms of geometry we work with, which are chosen because that seems to be roughly what reality is like — though even there, there’s no such thing as a “point” or a “line” (because we can’t draw something that takes up no space, and a line in geometry has no breadth and extends infinitely far).

To some extent, there are parallels to this continuum in literature. Once you define the rules of a sonnet, you will be hard-pressed to write one whose first line ends with “orange” or “chimney.”

But I can’t resist sharing something J.R.R. Tolkien said about writing The Hobbit : “It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. … Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I knew no more about the creatures than that, and it was years before his story grew. I don’t know where the word came from.”

Hobbits — did he create them or discover them?

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7 Funny Essays Collections By and About Millennial Women

Reading Lists

If you grew up in the '90s and aughts, these books—rapt with butterfly clips, cds, and myspace nostalgia—are for you.

You may or may not realize it, but the 1990s weren’t just a few years ago, not even just twenty years ago. Though the style has been resurrected of late by younger generations eager to grift the gritty grunge and combat boots of the final decade of the 20th century, and the same slip dresses and crop tops I wore in my high school years are all the rage on, we are now thirty years removed from 1995. Soak that in for a quick second if you will. The number of years millennials are from our most formative years are numbered enough to have earned a safe driver’s discount.

For those of you as stricken by me by the very thought, take consolation in the fact that we aren’t alone—there are others, especially elder millennials and late Generation Xers breaching the over 40 threshold, who are weeping alongside us—creaky knees, backaches, colonoscopy appointments and all. Rife with so much yesteryear reminiscence that you’ll be back to wearing low-rise jeans, butterfly clips, and burning CDs using pirated music sites in no time, my debut memoir collection, A Product of Genetics (and Day Drinking) , is guaranteed to send you straight into a memory spiral. If you ever bought a box of cereal based solely on the prize promised inside, yearned to be a Full House sibling, or explored hundreds of miles on a bike barefoot and unsupervised, this collection of essays is right up your alley.

The books below are a compilation of funny essay collections written by millennial women that will have you laughing and soaking in the nostalgia of days gone by. The authors of these books have voices that show that quirk is in and that stumbling on the way is the norm. These are the titles you might not have known that you needed (but most certainly do).

You’re Gonna Die Alone (& Other Excellent News) by Devrie Donaldson

For anyone who wants to relive the horror of a Furby come alive in a darkened room (you do, I promise), this taste of growing up in the 1990s is the perfect dip into shared memories and the author’s tales of surviving being messy and trying to figure out who she is. In this fantastic collection of stories, readers can expect to laugh, cry, and commiserate—sometimes all at once.

Shit, Actually by Lindy West

If you aren’t already in love with this author, prepare yourself because you’re about to be all in. In this 2020 tome, West examines all our favorite movies with her inane ability to tell it like it is. Amusingly enough, West says all the things we’ve all been thinking for years, but in a better, funnier, more biting way that makes us wish we had actually said it first. In her examination of the hallmarks of cinema, she begs us to ask ourselves: Do these box office hits and cult classics still hold water? Did they deserve the hype in the first place? What in the actual hell? And should we be proud to admit that they’re our favorites or watch them in absolute zipper-mouth private never to be spoken of?

Well, This Is Exhausting by Sophia Benoit

If there’s anyone who gets what it’s like to just not get it, it’s Sophia Benoit as described in this book of funny essays. Plan to laugh, cry, and feel confused, certain, uncertain, and wholly understood by the book’s end. This collection is such a chef’s kiss embodiment of what growing up in the 1990s was like for so many of our generation. It rides the waves of crappy dates, guilty pleasures, so much self-doubt that our brains runneth over, and a human experience so comfortingly familiar that you suspect that you and the author are meant to be forever besties.

Weird But Normal by Mia Mercado

More than anything, this one made me feel seen and realize that not feeling normal, not always understanding myself, not knowing how to human is, in fact, standard. The author celebrates the fact that from the beginning we are all just a bunch of mostly aimless weirdos. We start out weird and just eventually evolve and age into a different kind of weird. If you don’t get some comfort from that, we are not the same kind of person.

One In A Millennial by Kate Kennedy

There’s a reason that this book was an instant New York Times Bestseller, it deserved to be. Dripping with all things deliciously pop culture and growing up as a millennial, Kennedy takes her essay collection to a new level with her hilarious take on being a woman, her lived experiences, and what our culture and time in space means. Each story in the book drives you to want more and read onward just to revel in the fact that it’s so damned nice to commiserate with someone who is still very much in their figuring-it-out era.

Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby

Experiences so awkward that just peeking into them is a bit mortifying, hot takes that make you feel like all that crap swirling around in your head isn’t as crazy as you suspect, and chapter after chapter with Irby’s trademark wit and humor go a long way in this recent release. If any book of hers will snag new readers, this is it. She talks about her love for Dave Matthews, run-ins with anaphylaxis,  and moments of bare-bones honesty that sometimes just hit you in the face.

Please Don’t Sit On My Bed In Your Outside Clothes by Phoebe Robinson

In this 2021 collection by the iconic comedian who is truly making things happen on and off the page, Robinson’s conversational tone and nothing-off-limits banter make you feel like you’re riding shotgun in your bestie’s car on the way to the store to buy the makings for margaritas. Whether she’s bemoaning the woes of dating or shelling out advice like a big sister, she keeps her essays funny, light, and pop culture-infused enough to always make a reader flip forward for just one more story before moving on.

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Too gay? Too political? Ron Nyswaner leaned into it all with ‘Fellow Travelers’

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I began the pitch for “Fellow Travelers,” my adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s beautiful novel, with a piece of personal history. Growing up in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1960s, I never heard the word “homosexual” spoken aloud. There were no gay characters in movies, books or on television. I grew up believing that my hidden self was evil. Unspeakable.

I was captivated by Mallon’s story of Hawkins (Hawk) Fuller and Timothy Laughlin, two vastly different men conducting a passionate affair in 1950s Washington, D.C., during the government’s crusade against homosexuals. Hawk is selfish and confident. Tim is religious and sensitive. They struggle to love while hiding the part of themselves that allows them to love.

I was advised this story would be impossible to sell for three reasons: It was period, political and gay.

Being rebellious by nature, I decided to lean into the elements of the story that were deemed challenging. A period piece is problematic? In our scripts, every detail will be meticulously researched and much of the dialogue will come from historical records.

That time Meryl Streep reached out and said she wanted to work with me

‘We were given the gift of a dream cast for a half-hour television comedy with mysterious twists and turns,’ writes ‘Only Murders’ showrunner John Hoffman. ‘We decided to triple down on the shot we were given.’

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Rather than avoid politics, we’ll turn our political characters into flesh-and-blood antagonists, illuminating the dark secrets behind their destructive deeds. The whole thing is just too gay? We’ll create a gay love story with sex scenes that are passionate, tense and rough. We’ll take you on a gay sex tour through the decades, from park restrooms to backroom bars. In the end, we’ll break your heart.

We sold the show and made it. I have to acknowledge the executives at Fremantle and Showtime who embraced our “balls-out” approach (the expression seems apt) and my intrepid executive producers: Robbie Rogers, Dan Minahan and Matt Bomer.

We knew we needed to wrap our challenging elements inside a story that is universal and modern. The paranoia of the McCarthy era felt remote, and Mallon’s book ends in 1957. But I’d lived through the early days of AIDS, known the terror as those around me fell ill and died, and witnessed the hatred directed at my community.

I realized the AIDS crisis could serve as a bookend to the Lavender Scare. Tim would live in San Francisco, an activist, in the early days of the epidemic. Hawk will travel to Tim, seeking forgiveness, giving Tim power over Hawk in a reversal of their former roles. And these timelines will alternate throughout the show.

But the wheels of my mind kept turning. How might I bring Hawk and Tim together one or two more times? Again, I turned to personal history.

In high school, I was known as the sissy kid with liberal politics who loved Jesus. I protested the Vietnam War and refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because the United States hadn’t yet achieved “liberty and justice for all.” When I was banished to the last row of desks in my homeroom, I considered it a badge of honor.

The sixth episode of the series, “Beyond Measure,” is set in 1968. Tim’s passionate anticommunist politics have morphed into antiwar politics. His Christianity, like mine in my youth, addresses his need to be exalted, to live and love “beyond measure.” In my teen years, my religious fervor offered what my peers found in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

I came out in the late 1970s, drinking, snorting and tumbling into bed with sweaty strangers after nights of dancing to Donna, Thelma and Grace. It was glorious. We had a few gay heroes but none more inspiring than Harvey Milk, the first nationally prominent gay politician. His murder was a shock and a wake-up call, reminding us that we’d only begun to win our freedom.

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Episode 7 of “Fellow Travelers,” “White Nights,” is set in 1979. Hawk and Tim reunite on Fire Island. They splash in the ocean, visit the “meat rack” and sweat on the dance floor. They seem free, until Hawk is forced to face excruciating grief. We placed our second set of lovers, Marcus and Frankie, in San Francisco, for the “explosion of gay rage” that followed the trial of Harvey Milk’s murderer, Dan White, and its obscene, lenient sentence.

Hawk’s grief, and his yearning to lose himself in drugs and sex, was informed by my own descent into alcoholism and addiction. The candlelight march honoring Milk that ends the episode is coupled with Hawk’s decision to return home. Twenty-five years ago, I began my own way home, finding a sober way to live.

The series ends at the National Mall in 1987 with the first display of the AIDS Quilt. Hawk kneels at Tim’s quilt square and gives words to the truth he’s carried in his heart for 3½ decades: “He was the man I loved.” Hawk finds redemption in speaking the unspeakable.

I know how he feels.

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Surgeon General Calls for Warning Labels on Social Media Platforms

Dr. Vivek Murthy said he would urge Congress to require a warning that social media use can harm teenagers’ mental health.

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By Ellen Barry and Cecilia Kang

The U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, announced on Monday that he would push for a warning label on social media platforms advising parents that using the platforms might damage adolescents’ mental health.

Warning labels — like those that appear on tobacco and alcohol products — are one of the most powerful tools available to the nation’s top health official, but Dr. Murthy cannot unilaterally require them; the action requires approval by Congress.

The proposal builds on several years of escalating warnings from the surgeon general. In a May 2023 advisory, he recommended that parents immediately set limits on phone use, and urged Congress to swiftly develop health and safety standards for technology platforms.

He also called on tech companies to make changes: to share internal data on the health impact of their products; to allow independent safety audits; and restrict features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which he says “prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use.”

In an interview, Dr. Murthy said he had been deeply frustrated by the platforms’ reluctance to do so.

“I don’t think we can solely rely on the hope that the platforms can fix this problem on their own,” he said. “They’ve had 20 years.”

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