After the Death of Literature: Essays on the Contemporary Novel by Peter Boxall
Published 2020 · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is After the Death of Literature: Essays on the Contemporary Novel to read?
After the Death of Literature: Essays on the Contemporary Novel scores 60 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: 68 out of 100
- Sophisticated critical vocabulary without heavy jargon.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- High-level theoretical claims about the novel's ontological condition.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Rich with argument and literary reference throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Direct argument, though the subject — belatedness — gives the prose a recursive quality.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Analytical register throughout.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- The subject of literary death licenses a measured ironic intelligence.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- Deliberately leaves the novel's future open as a productive question.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Organized thematically across a series of extended author studies.
How After the Death of Literature: Essays on the Contemporary Novel is regarded
After the Death of Literature: Essays on the Contemporary Novel holds a literary regard score of 71 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.