The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature by Berthold Schoene
Published 2007 · 560 pages · 110,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature to read?
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature scores 61 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: 62 out of 100
- Variable across forty contributors but consistently accessible scholarly prose.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Abstraction: 66 out of 100
- Essays balance contextual and theoretical argument with author-specific and genre-specific close reading.
- Information density: 74 out of 100
- Very high information load given the breadth of coverage across genres, authors, and contexts.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Essay format with transparent argument and clear introduction-body-conclusion structure.
- Symbolic density: 13 out of 100
- Analytical treatment of Scottish cultural symbols rather than figurative deployment.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Varied tonal register across contributors; generally serious scholarly tone.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Individual essays conclude their arguments; the companion format produces a mosaic rather than a unified argument.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Four-part edited volume with over forty essays; complexity is organizational and cumulative.
How The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature is regarded
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature 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.