In his essay “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau opens by saying, “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’” ( ), and then clarifies that his true belief is “‘That government is best which governs not →
An analysis of two seminal works from African-American literature, both drawn from the authors’ autobiographies, reveals that the processes of learning to read and write is conceptualized as the means of personal and social liberation. While Frederick Douglass’s “Learning to →
Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X all represent a distinct voice from a different subaltern community. →
All literary theory has as its task defining what literature is and how it should be studied. As part of this work, literary theorists are concerned with answering a number of questions, among them, what are the respective roles of →
There are many common themes available for a comparison essay of The Republic by Plato and Leviathan by Hobbes but one of the most salient points to be made is that they share ideological similarities. Although there is some consensus on →
The view Plato and Socrates hold about the role of women in society is at times easy to confuse with a more modern sense of gender equality because he advocates a mostly equal upbringing, but closer examination reveals that this →
Meno seems surprised when Socrates is unable to provide an answer to his questions about the nature and definition of virtue, but this rhetorical method allows Socrates to later question Meno’s assumptions about what is and is not virtue. “For my soul and →
Mary Jemison’s narrative indicates that during the eighteenth century accounts of captivity began to offer two competing narratives of national identity. One narrative equated the English family with English culture and unfolded as if perpetuating the Englishness of Anglo-America depended →
Throughout The Book of Margery Kempe the narrow roles for medieval women that were codified by the Church and more generally, the patriarchal society, were hardly negotiable. There were a set of strict expectations defining a woman’s duty both inside the home →
David Hume contributed significantly to political and economic thought through his vast collection of writings, including. “Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary” and was one of the leading figures in the emerging Scottish version of the same period of Enlightenment that was sweeping →