Sean Myers

Much of Plato’s thought about the freedom of individuals is encapsulated in The Republic, which lays out Plato’s idea of justice, his political ideology, and the ideal state. Because Plato largely...

Hamlet’s dilemma is whether and how to kill King Claudius after learning that Claudius killed his father, married his mother, and took the throne of Denmark. The entire play revolves around this...

Aristotle’s Poetics has many important features, from its influence on literary theory, to the notion of catharsis, to its description of the elements and rules of tragedy. Before the Poetics, no...

Saying that "Lincoln freed the slaves" is accurate, but far too simple to express a very nuanced truth. The first legal maneuver that Lincoln took to free slaves was the Emancipation Proclamation,...

In The Iliad, by Homer, Achilles refuses to fight for the Greeks in the siege of Troy after King Agamemnon takes his concubine. Achilles' refusal turns the tide of war against the Greeks. To...

This is an opinion question, and could really be answered either way. The prior expert's answer focuses on how marketing drives much of what we desire—or think we desire—in life, and how this...

The civil liberties that are enjoyed by the people of the United States are outlined in the Amendments to the Constitution, the first ten of which are also known as the Bill of Rights. For example,...

Perhaps one of the most contemporary social issues that Jonathan Swift satirizes in Gulliver's Travels is the status of the highly educated in society and their usefulness in practical life. In...

The Preface to Shakespeare is the opening to Samuel Johnson's highly influential work of literary criticism, The Plays of William Shakespeare. In the Preface, Johnson vaunts Shakespeare's...

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is a story about growing up, known in the literary world as a bildungsroman, despite the fact that its main character, Bilbo, is not a child or young adult when the...

A whole host of outcomes are possible, largely depending on the political and economic climate. However, the relative ability of the government to run the business, and the ends it is aiming for,...

The climax of a book is the event that all of the earlier tension has led to, the turning point in the story where the action resolves that tension and all of the problems begin to get answered. In...

In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, there are many similarities in the relationship and eventual marriage of Jack and Gwendolen on one hand and Algernon and Cecily on the other. Many...

Literally, the speaker in A Modest Proposal identifies with the English imperialists, calling for more stringent measures to ensure British dominance over the Irish people remain unchallenged....

In many of his plays, including in As You Like It, Shakespeare creates contrasting atmospheres and settings that his characters move between. One of these atmospheres is that of a city or a...

The American Revolution began in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the Declaration of Independence.  On the ground, major battles took place along the East coast of what was to become the...

Ending the play at Hamlet's death would leave several practical plot points unresolved and the audience would also be deprived of some crucial character development. In the last lines of the play,...

The Aeneid is an epic myth about the founding of Rome. The author Virgil, who was a Roman himself, begins the story where Homer's Iliad ends: the sack of Troy. The Trojan Aeneas,...

Remember that, when analyzing a particular passage, it is the context that it comes in that dictates much of its meaning, especially when it comes to literary terms. At this point...

The two main ideas in Modernity: An Unfinished Project are Modernism and Postmodernism. The exact definitions of these terms are almost impossible to state precisely—they're more of a zeitgeist,...