Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont
Published 1940 · 336 pages · 143,559 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Love in the Western World to read?
Love in the Western World scores 66 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
- Scholarly but readable; some medievalist and theological vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- High-level cultural and structural argument about the mythology of desire.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Rich with historical, literary, and theological material throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- The Tristan myth is analyzed rather than retold, but its narrative presence shapes the argument.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The Tristan-Isolde myth functions as a controlling symbolic structure.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- De Rougemont's critique of romantic ideology is ironic about its own culture's assumptions.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Reaches clear diagnostic conclusions; prescriptions are more open.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Moves across medieval poetry, theology, Romanticism, and modernity in an interlocked argument.
How Love in the Western World is regarded
Love in the Western World 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.