Heathcliff and the Great Hunger by Terry Eagleton
Published 1995 · 95,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Heathcliff and the Great Hunger to read?
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger scores 72 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. 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
- Marxist critical vocabulary handled with rhetorical flair rather than jargon.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 74 out of 100
- Moves between cultural-materialist theory and specific literary and historical analysis.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Dense historical and literary argument with broad comparative reach.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Essayistic indirection in structure; each essay arrives at its argument via provocative detours.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- Analyzes cultural symbols in texts without deploying heavy symbolism in the critical prose.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- Eagleton's irony is a consistent rhetorical tool for deflating cultural pieties.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Individual essays resolve their arguments; the collection as a whole is deliberately heterogeneous.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Disparate essays with different methods and objects, loosely unified by cultural-materialist approach.
How Heathcliff and the Great Hunger is regarded
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger holds a literary regard score of 81 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.