Very early on, when I was having real doubts about the value of literary analysis – not helped by my lecturers taking that elitist cop out that if you don’t just know the value of literary analysis then you shouldn’t even bother as you’ll never know, I came across the work of Georg Lukacs. He wrote that the objective of all literary analysis is to make the work of the writer easier and better. Since I had found myself totally at sea in a world of people writing what I regarded as inane, self-glorying nonsense, like a fine novel but ultimately a failure and the beauty of the prose is only matched by the beauty of the imagination this was a lifeline and a way of finding meaning in literary analysis and criticism.
