A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell
Published 1944 · 350 pages · 149,091 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays
How hard is A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake to read?
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Scholarly vocabulary explaining Joyce's invented language.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Academic prose, clear but demanding.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Literary criticism requiring sophisticated engagement.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with analysis and interpretation.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Campbell and Robinson explain directly.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- Expository work explaining others' symbols.
- Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
- Scholarly earnestness.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- Offers interpretive framework.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Organized by Wake's structure.
How A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is regarded
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.