Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler
Published 1960 · 130,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Love and Death in the American Novel to read?
Love and Death in the American Novel scores 65 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
- Psychoanalytic and mythographic vocabulary delivered with rhetorical bravado.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Claims operate at the level of national psychology and cultural mythology.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Dense with literary reference and argument across a vast range of texts.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- The thesis is announced but then circled back to through many oblique approaches.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- Death, the wilderness, and the dark other carry heavy symbolic freight.
- Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
- Fiedler maintains a provocateur's ironic stance toward American cultural pieties.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The thesis is argued to a clear but unsettling conclusion.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Organized by historical period and theme with a single governing thesis.
How Love and Death in the American Novel is regarded
Love and Death in the American Novel holds a literary regard score of 84 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.