The Penguin New Literary History of Australia by Laurie Hergenhan
Published 1988 · 120,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Penguin New Literary History of Australia to read?
The Penguin New Literary History of Australia scores 68 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: 61 out of 100
- Clear academic prose; contributors use postcolonial and feminist critical vocabulary accessibly.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Engages questions of literary value, canon formation, and national identity at a sustained theoretical level.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Comprehensive coverage of previously neglected genres and writers adds density to each chapter.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct argumentative essays; the political framing of the collection is stated openly.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- The bush mythology and the bicentennial are analyzed as national symbols.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Several contributors engage ironically with the dominant tradition's exclusions.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each essay makes its argument clearly; the collection poses the canon question as an ongoing debate.
- Structural complexity: 43 out of 100
- Multi-author volume covering multiple genres and periods; the organizational strategy itself enacts the argument.
How The Penguin New Literary History of Australia is regarded
The Penguin New Literary History of Australia holds a literary regard score of 80 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.