Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War by Edmund Wilson
Published 1962 · 300,000 words · about 20 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, History, Politics & Society
How hard is Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War to read?
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately 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: 55 out of 100
- Wilson writes in a cultivated mid-century critic's register with period quotations and literary allusions, but the prose stays clear. It sits closer to The Great Gatsby's elegance than to dense theory.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- His sentences run long and balanced, with parenthetical asides and heavy quotation from 19th-century sources. They are readable and well controlled.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- The book is anchored in concrete people, letters, diaries and speeches. Its argument about state power and national myth stays tied to texts.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Dozens of figures, memoirs and novels are covered in long chapters of biography and quotation. Readers absorb a lot of history and literary detail at once.
How Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War is regarded
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War holds a literary regard score of 74 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.