Literature Studies Editing and Proofreading Services

The essay says the novel's final chapter unsettles the reader's sympathy for the narrator. It may be entirely right. But it moves from that claim to the next one without quoting a line, and the reader is asked to accept an account of the text on the strength of the critic's confidence. The argument is not wrong. It is simply not yet evidence.

We edit what literary scholars write — journal articles and monograph chapters, close readings and textual analysis, theoretical and critical-methodological work, comparative and translation studies, book history and editorial scholarship, reception and archival research, conference papers and reviews, and theses and grant applications. Our editors work on the close reading and the claim it earns.

The close reading is where literary criticism does its work, and its failure is an interpretation announced rather than demonstrated from the words on the page. A reading earns its claim by showing what in the text produces the effect being described. We work through these so the quoted passage is long enough to contain what the argument needs and no longer, since a phrase lifted from its sentence can be made to mean nearly anything; so the feature carrying the claim is named specifically — the shift of tense, the buried subject, the repeated conjunction, the metre breaking at a particular foot — because "the language here is unsettling" describes the critic's experience rather than the text; so the movement from formal observation to interpretive claim is visible as a step the reader can refuse, given that criticism persuades by making its reasoning available; so the reading accounts for what does not fit rather than quoting only the supporting lines, as a passage that resists the argument is usually the interesting one; so theoretical vocabulary is made to do work in the reading instead of standing in for it; so the text's own edition, translation and variants are specified where they affect the argument; and so secondary criticism is engaged where it has said something different. Essays written this way persuade readers who came in disagreeing.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished chapters, articles under review and thesis material. We are editors rather than literary critics, and we offer no view on interpretation, theory or the merits of any reading. What we can do is make the reading earn its claim.