Intelligent Education
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, who is, considered one of the best detective-story writers in America.
As an author of action-detective novels, Hammett wrote legendary characters, which were eventually, turned into movie, radio, and TV drama figures. Moreover, his work explored complex themes such as logic prevailing over crime and the place of order in human...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which was the best selling book in 1939 and won the National Book Award.
As a 1939 American realist novel, The Grapes of Wrath follows a struggling family on their search for work, success, and safety during the Great Depression. Moreover, Steinbeck discusses social philosophy by weaving in themes such as family, betrayal,...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by John Steinbeck. Titles in this study guide include The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, East of Eden, and The Winter of our Discontent.
As an author of the Civil Rights Era, Steinbeck effectively writes symbolic structures and conveys social criticism in a progressively idealistic tone. Moreover, his proletarian themes strike...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which he claimed as his first true, novel despite having written several before it.
As an 1877 realist novel, Anna Karenina follows a Russian wife in the midst of a love affair, who risks all she has for a lover. Moreover, Tolstoy discusses the betrayal by weaving in themes such as forgiveness, social class, and jealousy. This Bright Notes...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for the best-known English Romantic poets, including William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats. As defenders of imagination and spirituality, these celebrated poets are recognized for their collective protest against the principles of the English Neoclassical period.
As a collection...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, arguably the most famous of all Middle English literature.
As a series of twenty-four stories, The Canterbury Tales was written in 1392 and tells of the pilgrimage of thirty people from various social classes to Canterbury. Moreover, Chaucer uses each story to represent a theme in order to exemplify the changing of societal...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Eugene O'Neill, an American playwright and recipient of four Pulitzer Prizes. Titles in this study guide include Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Ah, Wilderness!, The Iceman Cometh, and A Touch of the Poet.
As a writer of the twentieth century, O'Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize. Moreover, his plays...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Patrick White. Titles in this study guide include The Aunts, The Vivisector, The Solid Mandala, The Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot, Voss, and The Eye of the Storm.
As a writer of the twentieth-century, his work, included a stream of consciousness technique and unique shifting narrative points. Moreover, White was the first and only Australian...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Herman Melville's Billy Budd, his final novel.
As a book of the twentieth-century, Melville focused on society's limiting forces on people's individuality. Moreover, Billy Budd has two versions as it was, completed by different authors after Melville's death. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Herman Melville's classic work, helping...
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As a novel set after the American Civil War, Beloved acknowledges the millions of lives taken on the Atlantic slave trade and recognizes the hardships that faced freed slaves. Moreover, Morrison encompasses the supernatural, community, self and women-empowerment, and overall culture of both post-Civil War and post-Civil Rights America. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Morrison's classic work, helping students to thoroughly,...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Aldous Huxley. Titles in this study guide include Brave New World, Point Counter Point, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and Eyeless in Gaza.
As a gifted critic, with an unprecedented, intelligence, Huxley's science fiction vividly, expresses the power and corruption of technology and politics in contemporary society. Moreover, Huxley's lifelong...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground, considered to be one of the very first existentialist novels.
As a novel of nineteenth-century Russia, Notes From the Underground challenged and created new methods of understanding towards the 'enlightened' utopian ideas that explored in Russia. Moreover, the novel dives deep into themes of isolation, folly, and extremist...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Voltaire's Candide, considered one of Voltaire's most signature works.
As an influential philosophical novel of the Age of Enlightenment, Candide is a pivotal and powerful example of French satirical wit of social and political justice. Moreover, Voltaire employs sharp criticism against nobility, philosophy, the church, and cruelty. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, the author's first attempt at historical fiction.
As a novel of the nineteenth-century, the story of The Prince and the Pauper continues to live on through video games, movies, TV shows, and books. Moreover, the novel presents timelessly relevant themes of justice and judgement, identity, and, society and class. This Bright...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. These two English philosophers are recognized for being some of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers.
As two of the most prominent philosophers of the 17th century, Hobbes and Locke illustrated opposing and rebellious views on the ideal form of government and sovereignty, that included religion and empiricism. Moreover,...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was an immediate critical success upon its release in 1964.
As a novel of the late 1900s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a product of Kesey's drug stimulated imagination, and much of the original material was written under the influence of LSD and peyote which Kesey took to induce in himself a state of mind...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Sophocles, one of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived. Titles in this study guide include Oedipus, Philoctetes, Trachiniae, Electra, Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Ajax.
As a playwright of fifth- century BCE, he is one of the most famous Greek Tragedians. Moreover, his surviving plays are proof of his perfection of the genre...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Alexander Pope, considered to be one of the greatest English poets to date. Titles in this study guide include The Rape of the Lock, Windsor Forest, Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Eloisa to Abelard, Three Hours After Marriage, Pastorals, Messiah, his translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the Dunciad, An Essay on Man,...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for W Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, agreed to be Maugham's most noted and most important work.
As a bildungsroman of the early 20th century, Of Human Bondage is Maugham's strongly autobiographical story of the evolution of a young man through the storm and stress of youth. Moreover, Maugham writing is an example of finding serenity despite haunting and imperfect...
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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, regarded as one of literature's first counter narratives.
As a classic novel written two years before Nigeria's independence, Things Fall Apart showcases a pre-colonized Nigeria and the transformation of culture after English colonization. Moreover, Achebe is a colorful and gifted storyteller, allowing readers to experience a...