Book Title: Close Reading

Book Description

Close Reading: A Handbook is an open educational resource designed to help burgeoning literary critics become more confident, attentive, and flexible readers of literature. The handbook begins from a simple but powerful premise: literary texts make arguments about the world, and they make those arguments through form. Rather than asking only what a story is about, close readers ask how the story creates meaning—through its diction, imagery, symbolism, allusions, conflicts, characters, narration, pacing, setting, syntax, and other formal choices.

Written for students developing their skills in literary analysis, the handbook offers clear explanations of major formal elements in prose literature, along with examples, analytical strategies, and exercises. Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of form and shows how that formal element can help readers move from observation to interpretation. The handbook gives students a flexible set of tools they can adapt to different texts, assignments, and interpretive questions.

Accessible, practical, and designed for repeated use, Close Reading: A Handbook can serve as a course text, reference guide, or companion to literary study. It invites students to see close reading as a practice: a way of noticing, questioning, rereading, and making arguments about how literature speaks to the world beyond the page.