Culture and Society: 1780–1950 by Raymond Williams
Published 1958 · 110,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Culture and Society: 1780–1950 to read?
Culture and Society: 1780–1950 scores 55 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: 58 out of 100
- Measured scholarly prose; Williams is notably clear for a Marxist theorist.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- The concept of culture is argued at a high level of abstraction while being grounded in texts.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Each chapter a dense account of a writer's response to industrial culture.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- The governing thesis is stated early; subsequent chapters deepen rather than divert.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Culture and community carry sustained value-weight throughout.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Williams maintains critical distance from the tradition he is sympathetically documenting.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The argument accumulates toward a clear but open-ended conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Organized chronologically by thinker with a cumulative analytical argument.
How Culture and Society: 1780–1950 is regarded
Culture and Society: 1780–1950 holds a literary regard score of 87 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.