The Novel and the Police by D. A. Miller
Published 1988 · 237 pages · 88,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Novel and the Police to read?
The Novel and the Police scores 70 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: 73 out of 100
- Foucauldian vocabulary ('panopticism', 'discursive', 'dispositif') integrated throughout without definition.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- High-theory argument connecting narrative technique to political economy of power.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Each chapter advances both close reading and theoretical argument at full density.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- The theoretical argument unfolds indirectly through extended textual analysis.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- The panopticon, the detective, the body as recurring theoretical-symbolic figures.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Miller's irony operates at the level of exposing what Victorian fiction pretends not to know.
- Resolution withholding: 16 out of 100
- Conclusions are deliberately withheld to implicate the reader in the disciplinary logic.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Four extended case studies linked by a single theoretical argument, with a dense prologue.
How The Novel and the Police is regarded
The Novel and the Police 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.