An Untamed State: The Politics of Romance Fiction by Sarah Wendell
Published 2009 · 72,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is An Untamed State: The Politics of Romance Fiction to read?
An Untamed State: The Politics of Romance 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: 53 out of 100
- Conversational and witty prose aimed at engaged general readers rather than academics.
- Sentence structure: 47 out of 100
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Cultural arguments are made concrete through dozens of specific trope examples and reader anecdotes.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Information-rich survey that covers wide ground quickly without lingering on any single point.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Comic framing occasionally delays the analytical point for rhetorical effect.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- Cover clinch and genre tropes are discussed as cultural symbols, though lightly rather than exhaustively.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- The book's voice is deliberately ironic, self-aware, and comedic throughout.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Conclusions are presented with confidence even when the evidence is anecdotal.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Loose thematic organisation typical of popular non-fiction, easy to dip in and out of.
How An Untamed State: The Politics of Romance Fiction is regarded
An Untamed State: The Politics of Romance Fiction holds a literary regard score of 55 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.