You can see examples of literary scholars reading texts very carefully and writing very short interpretations of those texts.
One great way to build context for your reading is to see what other scholars have said about the themes and characters in your book. Scholars don't always agree with each other, so it's interesting to skim more than one article. Look for how that scholar interprets the work, and how that scholar talks about interpretations done by other scholars.
There are many places to search for good scholarly discussion about literature. We're just going to look at one of these places.
One of the best ways to build context for what you're reading is to follow the citations left for you by literary scholars. If you read an interesting line and find that the author of your article has included a citation after that line, follow that citation to it's book or article. Most likely that book or article will also be interesting as you build context around the literary work you're studying.
Use the boxes below to help you see if we have the book or the journal article to which your citation refers.
Article citations generally have an author's name, an article title (in quotation marks), a journal title (in italics), volume and issue numbers, a year of publication, and page numbers.
Book citations generally have an author's name, a book title (in italics), and a place and year of publication. Citations to chapters in books will include all of these things with the addition of a chapter title (before the book title, and in quotations marks) and an editor's name (after the book title). In both cases: