Literature Glossary
Don’t be an oxymoron. Know your literary terms.
Over 200 literary terms, Shmooped to perfection.
Manifesto
Definition:
If you are starting a new lifestyle—more exercise! more ice cream! more Shmoop!—and you feel like shouting it from the rooftops… do it. Seriously, that would be awesome.
Once you're done, though, why not write it down and turn it into a manifesto?
When people start a new anything—government, art form, technology—they often write a manifesto to tell the world the basic tenets and intentions of their new thang.
You've probably heard of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's The Communist Manifesto and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. But don't let that scare you off. There's another little manifesto you may have heard of before, too. We here at Shmoop know it as the Declaration of Independence. No big deal.