A Literature Review focuses on isolating a set of key texts and clarifying how they speak to each other.  It aims to map the field you’re preparing to enter and to orient your reader in such a way that s/he can read the map, too.  Lay out the axes and poles of one or more important conversations(s) related to your topic; highlight the most prominent features of its topography.  If your Lit Review were a discussion forum, then you would identify the major threads of debate and the major contributors to those debates.  Who stands where, and where do they stand in relation to each other?

The library at UC Santa Cruz and the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison both feature good general overviews of the Literature Review, and I encourage you to read and compare them.  (I would not, however, recommend UCSC’s sample lit reviews.)
 
The library at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia offers a bit more detail, which I’ll selectively quote:

The review of relevant literature is nearly always a standard [section or] chapter of a thesis or dissertation.  [I]ts purpose is [in part] to provide the background to and justification for the research undertaken … [T]here are [other] good reasons for spending time and effort on a review of the literature before embarking on a research project.  These reasons include:

• to identify gaps in the literature
• to avoid reinventing the wheel (at the very least this will save time and it can stop you from making the same mistakes as others)
• to carry on from where others have already reached (reviewing the field allows you to build on the platform of existing knowledge and ideas)
• to identify other people working in the same fields (a researcher network is a valuable resource)
• to increase your breadth of knowledge of your subject area
• to identify seminal works in your area
• to provide the intellectual context for your own work, enabling you to position your project relative to other work
• to identify opposing views
• to put your work into perspective
• to demonstrate that you can access previous work in an area
• to identify information and ideas that may be relevant to your project
• to identify methods that could be relevant to your project

As for the style and mechanics involved in actually writing the thing:

• The guide prepared by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Writing Center is slightly condescending in tone and seems to be aimed at an undergraduate audience, but it does have the advantage of being directed at writers of lit reviews in the Humanities.  It also contains some especially useful advice about organization and structure, as well as a sample paragraph from a lit review on the topic of sexism and language.  I recommend following these guidelines for the shape and structure of your review, adapting them to your particular circumstances as necessary.
  
  
• If you’re looking for a more extensive example, however, then walk through the lit review tutorial put together by the nice reference librarians at American University in Washington, DC.  The "Where Can I Get More Information?" tab includes links to other sites (including most of those I've listed above), while the "What Do I Need to Succeed?" tab includes a downloadable sample literature review. It employs APA format rather than MLA, but in most other respects, it should serve as an excellent model for your own work.  (The body of this review, minus the title page [which you shouldn’t include in yours] and the Works Cited list [which you should] runs a bit over 15 pages.)
  
  
• For further models, I again encourage you to review selected chapters of McComiskey’s English Studies.

Although you’re aiming for 7 to 10 (no more than 15) pages, you will almost certainly be “reviewing” relatively fewer sources than any of the above examples do.  (Six or so core works, drawn from your annotated and/or working bibliographies, would be a reasonable target.)  In some instances your level of review may be more detailed or more extensive, comparatively speaking, than what you typically see in these models—and that’s okay.  There may also be one or two texts that you come back to repeatedly over the entire length of the review, whereas another might only get a passing reference in the midst of a discussion of some broader conversation in the field.

Due Date: No later than Tueesday, December 16 at 5:00 p.m. (but welcomed much earlier!)