Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq by Kate McLoughlin
Published 2011 · 230 pages · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq to read?
Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq scores 65 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
- Combines narratological terminology with literary-critical precision across multiple national traditions.
- Sentence structure: 64 out of 100
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- Explicitly theoretical method organizes war literature by formal and rhetorical problems rather than history.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Wide range of primary texts synthesized across chapters toward shared formal arguments.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Analytic rather than narrative, though deeply attentive to indirection in the texts it reads.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- Tracks figurative and symbolic strategies in primary texts as critical analytical objects.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Maintains critical detachment appropriate to comparative scholarly argument across vast range.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Conclusions are articulated clearly at chapter ends; the book does not cultivate ambiguity.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Thematic rather than chronological organization creates productive non-linearity across a vast literary range.
How Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq is regarded
Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq holds a literary regard score of 58 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.