Gothic by Fred Botting
Published 1996 · 240 pages · 55,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Gothic to read?
Gothic 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: 68 out of 100
- Poststructuralist vocabulary — excess, supplement, transgression — used throughout.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- Primarily concerned with Gothic as a cultural and theoretical category.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Compact text covering broad historical territory with theoretical density.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Theoretical argument often approaches its claims obliquely through close reading.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- Analyzes Gothic's symbolic economy of excess, transgression, and containment.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Critical distance from Gothic's excesses while taking them seriously as cultural symptoms.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Argument about excess and containment is itself somewhat unresolved by design.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Organized by historical period with a consistent theoretical framework applied throughout.
How Gothic is regarded
Gothic 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.