Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction by J. Paul Hunter
Published 1990 · 448 pages · 115,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction to read?
Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction scores 56 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: 60 out of 100
- Accessible academic prose; social-historical argument conveyed without heavy jargon.
- Sentence structure: 57 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Cultural-historical argument pitched between social history and literary theory.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Dense with historical evidence about print genres, reader demographics, and cultural context.
- Narrative indirection: 13 out of 100
- Direct argumentative prose throughout.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Analytical register.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Measured scholarly tone.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each chapter reaches its conclusions about a particular cultural context.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Organized by type of pre-novelistic discourse with an overarching cultural argument.
How Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction is regarded
Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction holds a literary regard score of 79 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.