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Dissertation..Literature Review

Hello

I am hoping some fellow final years or graduates can help a sister out here as i am getting no where with my supervisor and i have reached the point of MEH with my entire dissertation before i have got fully into it?

Can anyone advise how to go about doing a literature review and the structure of such as seriously have not been advised how to undertake one and like say i am at my wits end and making myself ill stressing out over it especially given my hand in date is the 27th March.

My motivation has gone completely and i just need an example or something to kick start the process of doing the literature review and i can feel i am making progress and not making myself further ill with stress over it.

Thank you for any sound advice and help you can provide :smile:
Reply 1
I'm in the humanities, so I don't know how helpful this will be.

A lit review should just be a quick summary of the major things that have been written in the area you're doing your dissertation in. It is meant to demonstrate that you are aware of what others have worked on in your field, and that you have read the key works for your diss. So for example for mine, which was on Italian history, I just had a few paragraphs about some of the 'big books' about the subject, and some articles that were directly relevant to my particular topic. You can also include a short discussion of where your topic fits into what has already been written - so if you're writing about topic X, which articles Y & Z touched on but didn't go into much detail about, you can say how your diss is exploring topic X which has been neglected in the existing literature. Hope that helps a bit!
Reply 2
The above post is pretty helpful. The key to it is actually reading as much as you can before you start it. You will probably be aware of who the well-known academics are in your field and what the main books and texts are. Talk about what these academics have written on the subject and try to summarise a few of their most important arguments. Do the other academics agree with them? Is there a general consensus? Have they written anything that relates to your research question?
Is this undergrad or postgrad?

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