Margaret Mccarney, Ph.D.
eNotes Educator
Achievements
8
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342
Answers Posted
25
Answers Bonused
About
I've taught English in college and in high schools for thirty years. I most enjoy Shakespeare but have a broad interest in American and English literature and history.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in A Man for All Seasons
The three texts in questions are highly aware of themselves as literary fiction. Bolt takes a well-known historical event (Henry VIII's divorce and Thomas More's resistance to endorsing the... -
Answered a Question in Poetry
One way to answer this provocative question is to see this within the crisis of faith that permeates Modernism. Institutions such as church and state were deeply compromised in this era and the... -
Answered a Question in Much Ado About Nothing
This scene in Leonato's garden seems to be a throwaway in that it contains mostly banter between Benedick and Margaret. However, in a play so filled with wit and wordplay, this continues the... -
Answered a Question in The Awakening
Kate Chopin's The Awakening is part of America's literary movement called Regionalism, with the idea of place creating a strong element in the overall work's meaning. Set in Louisiana and the Grand... -
Answered a Question in Beowulf
In most respects, Beowulf is a good king. As a young warrior, Beowulf abides by the Anglo-Saxon values of the comitatus. This set of values emphasizes the interconnection of loyalty, bravery, and... -
Answered a Question in A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens uses symbolism to amplify the message of kindness in A Christmas Carol. Set during the Christmas season, which is itself a symbol-laden holiday, the story reminds us at the outset... -
Answered a Question in Song of Myself
Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" fits within the American Romantic movement. As such, it shares the reverence for nature one finds in all Romantics. Like his intellectual hero Emerson, Whitman... -
Answered a Question in Iliad
Homer's Iliad opens with thematic lines: Anger be now my song, immortal one, Akhileus' anger, doomed and ruinous, That causes the Akhaians loss on bitter loss And crowded brave souls into the... -
Answered a Question in Antigone
One element that makes Antigone timelessly relevant is the play's conflict between Creon and Antigone, both figures who hold to absolute values. In Creon's case, the rule of law is an absolute... -
Answered a Question in The Great Gatsby
While much of Fitzgerald's novel focuses on Gatsby and Daisy, Nick's position as the narrator contextualizes the events that occur that summer in NYC. The quote provided occurs early in Nick's... -
Answered a Question in Twelfth Night
The question, as asked, contains a few unstated assumptions that may not be supportable, yet it falls within the types of intriguing explorations Shakespeare's plays tempt, making them endless... -
Answered a Question in The Scarlet Letter
Chapter 16 in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is remarkable in may respects, as it prepares the reader for an intensely charged encounter between Hester and Dimmesdale in the next chapter. As Hester and... -
Answered a Question in The Canterbury Tales
Indirect characterization is a technique an author uses to provide a sense of character through speech, clothing, or actions. Direct characterization involves what the narrator says about the... -
Answered a Question in Dante's Inferno
There is not an easy way to answer this question, as much would remain entirely speculative and perhaps reductive. Overall, Dante might claim that he is tempted by all of these sins and the poem... -
Answered a Question in The Divine Comedy
Dante's poem is a masterwork in medieval numerology, with profoundly deep intellectual and structural similarities related to where a particular sin or virtue is addressed. The overall theme of the... -
Answered a Question in The Divine Comedy
In Dante's Divine Comedy and more specifically in the Inferno, the idea of the contrapasso serves as a unifying ironic feature. Unlike a poet such as Chaucer, whose satire is more overt and... -
Answered a Question in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neal Hurston opens here novel Their Eyes Were Watching God with an incredibly lyrical metaphor: Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For... -
Answered a Question in The Duchess of Malfi
While The Duchess of Malfi uses a somewhat looser form of blank verse (some shorter or longer lines), Webster's play largely stays in verse. Like other Early Modern dramatists, he follows the... -
Answered a Question in A Man for All Seasons
In Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More's conscience requires that he not sign Henry VIII's Oath of Supremacy. For Bolt, a self-declared agnostic, the point of the play is not to serve as a... -
Answered a Question in Battle Royal
Because Ellison's Invisible Man, from which "Battle Royal" is taken, offers a complex and nearly comprehensive indictment of racism in early twentieth-century America, multiple thesis statements... -
Answered a Question in Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford's personal growth is tracked through each of her three relationships. While Logan might wish to see her as a mule, or basically... -
Answered a Question in Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's poems reveal much about the English medieval period. First, the hegemony of Christianity in Europe grounds many of the assumptions in his texts. Belief in an afterlife of punishment or... -
Answered a Question in The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter contains a tense episode in chapter 17, when Hester decides to meet Dimmesdale in the forest and reveals her relationship to Chillingworth. While the question does... -
Answered a Question in Le Morte d'Arthur
Malory's Arthur is poignantly heroic. In Malory's shaping of the many stories of Arthur's adventures, we find a progression of character. Initially a young and eager king prone to conventional... -
Answered a Question in Crossing the Bar
When discussing diction in poetry, we are looking for a range of ways in which the poet uses words to construct an experience and advance a view of the world or of the human experience. Because... -
Answered a Question in Pride and Prejudice
Class is a persistent subtext in the novel, and Austen is keen on linking money and marriage in the many relationships. Class in England is far more than wealth, and the markers of class suggest... -
Answered a Question in Their Eyes Were Watching God
Hurston's novel opens with a lyrical meditation on seeing. Men see "ships at a distance" carrying their dreams; when they do not achieve their dreams, they become broken or bitter. For women, the... -
Answered a Question in A Midsummer Night's Dream
On the surface level, we might assume that Hermia and Lysander share their plans with Helena because she is their dear friend and because as young lovers, they lack the wisdom to know their plan... -
Answered a Question in Aeneid
The difference in cultural values between Homer's Greece and Virgil's Rome can be evaluated through a study of Achilles and Aeneas. Both are sons of goddesses, both are involved in the great Trojan... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
The scene in which Juliet learns and then processes the news of Tybalt's death is one of the most challenging for an actor playing this role. Beginning with her anticipation of consummating her... -
Answered a Question in Literature
A primary difference between academic and non-academic texts involves audience, which also speaks to purpose. An academic, nonfiction text will be based on research methods that can be replicated.... -
Answered a Question in Americanah
The quality that unites these three Adichie characters might best be defined as "grit." Each of these characters is singular in their talent, idealism, and hope. They all have talents, such as... -
Answered a Question in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
As the contemporary Emerson or Thoreau, Annie Dillard typically offers meditations on transcendental themes found by venturing into nature and observing it with keen sight and insight. Like her... -
Answered a Question in Much Ado About Nothing
While it is possible to read Shakespeare's comedies with overlapping concerns of the political, the cultural, and the personal at play, Much Ado About Nothing seems to use the political context of... -
Answered a Question in Literature
The three texts mentioned present women quite differently, in part due to their genre and in part due to their historical context. Epics tend to dwell on male interests, with women presented as... -
Answered a Question in Beowulf
While you don't mention which translation you are using, these phrases are all what are called kennings. A kenning is a two-word adjective prominent in Anglo-Saxon poetry. They give a distinct... -
Answered a Question in Lycidas
In all his poetry, Milton leans toward the "meta." Throughout his work, we see him thinking about his role as a poet, as an inspirational voice and as one who seeks to take his place among the most... -
Answered a Question in Romeo and Juliet
One quality that makes Juliet remarkable is her use of language, as one would expect in a Shakespearean hero. In Romeo and Juliet, we enter a world in which language is incredibly debased. Samson,... -
Answered a Question in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
McDonald's Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet is filled with clever commentary for those who know Shakespeare's plays. She adds a twist as well to many of the more conventional readings of... -
Answered a Question in The Merchant of Venice
Shylock is discriminated against early in the play and treated badly. Not only Antonio but his annoying friends, Salerio and Solanio, use language toward Shylock that seeks to dehumanize him and to... -
Answered a Question in The Chimney Sweeper
In Blake's poem from Songs of Innocence, Tom Dacre is a young boy who was most likely sold into the difficult business of sweeping chimneys. Orphans or illegitimate children were often given to the... -
Answered a Question in Pygmalion
It is hard to see Eliza's conflict as one in which nature rather than society or other people is most responsible. Other people's prejudices against lower-class individuals and society's rigid... -
Answered a Question in The Song of Roland
You don't say how many days or the age of the students, but these thoughts can be tailored somewhat to fit within your needs. First, as a notable medieval chanson de geste, it is worth exploring... -
Answered a Question in Hamlet
Claudius speaks in indirect language, using a couple of literary devices. He addresses "England," meaning the King of England. This is a form of metonymy in which the country is named instead of... -
Answered a Question in Dante's Inferno
Dante's allegory is so complex that multiple layers of interpretation are relevant here, so definitely look at other postings to this question. Dante himself said that his allegory is fourfold:... -
Answered a Question in Dante's Inferno
Early in Dante's poem, we learn that Dante must gird for battle like an epic hero, though his battle is against pity. In the early cantos, Dante struggles with his impulse to empathize with the... -
Answered a Question in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
As mentioned in other posts, the horse is unused to stopping in this open space—"Between the woods and frozen lake"—as there is no sense of purpose in doing so: no building, no capacity for work on... -
Answered a Question in Twelfth Night
The thread on this question offers solid answers of how the songs in Twelfth Night contribute to the complex mood of the play. This play begins with melancholy and death—including the presumed... -
Answered a Question in As I Lay Dying
This is a challenging question because Modernism complicates how we define heroism, and Faulkner tends to be rather tricky in how he presents character. In a traditional sense in which the hero... -
Answered a Question in King Lear
King Lear is the aged ruler of ancient Britain. He decides to carve his kingdom into three portions and to award these portions based on which of his daughters best professes her love to him. His...
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