critical essay

A composition that offers an analysis, interpretation, and/or evaluation of a text. Usually intended for an academic audience, a critical essay often takes the form of an argument.

See also:

• Book Report
• Close Reading
• Critical Thinking
• Critique
• Essay
• Essayist
• Evaluation Essay
• Literary Present
• The Modern Essay, by Virginia Woolf
• Research
• Review
• Revision and Editing Checklist for a Critical Essay
• Rhetorical Analysis

Examples of Critical Essays:

• "Jack and Gill: A Mock Criticism," by Joseph Dennie
• "Miss Brill's Fragile Fantasy": A Critical Essay About Katherine Mansfield's Short Story "Miss Brill"
• "Poor, Pitiful Miss Brill"
• Writing About Fiction: A Critical Essay on Hemingway's Novel The Sun Also Rises
• A Rhetorical Analysis of E B. White's Essay "The Ring of Time"
• A Rhetorical Analysis of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday"

Observations:

• "When we write a critical essay on a text, we read the text over and over and look at it every which way in the hope of seeing something aslant that we could not see directly. Every further reading has to deal with our previous readings: we write, then, from impressions which are already a palimpset. We assume that the latest reading is best, richest, issuing from a greater experience of the text. . . . Most books are content to be read once, they do not claim to be worth reading twice. Literature claims to be worth reading twice."
  (Denis Donoghue, "The Good Soldier," in England, Their England: Commentaries on English Language and Literature. Univ. of California Press, 1988)



• "[Samuel] Johnson was content to express personal opinions, and indulge strong prejudices, and among the early critical essayists of the 19th century the same habit of thought was dominant. The critical essay was often an extended review of a book, in which the critic did not disguise his own personal rancour, and made little effort to interpret his author. In many instances a book was used merely as an excuse for the publication of the critic's own opinions. Matthew Arnold was the first man to lay down the principle that no criticism of an author ought to be attempted without sympathy in the critic; that, in fact, criticism was less a polemic than an interpretation."
  (W. J. Dawson and C. Dawson, The Great English Essayists. Harper, 1909)



• "Reading critically means asking questions about what you are reading--questions about the meaning of the text and how that meaning is presented or about the author and his or her purpose for writing, for example. A critical reader does not simply accept what the author says but analyzes why the text is convincing (or not convincing)."
  (Andrea Lunsford, The St. Martin's Handbook. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008)