Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Lewalski
Published 1979 · 536 pages · 115,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric to read?
Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric scores 63 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: 68 out of 100
- Theological and literary-critical vocabulary integrated with precision.
- Sentence structure: 64 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Theological argument at a fairly high level of abstraction, grounded in textual evidence.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Combines doctrinal history, bibliographic knowledge, and close reading throughout.
- Narrative indirection: 14 out of 100
- Direct scholarly argument; the religious subject adds a meditative quality.
- Symbolic density: 16 out of 100
- The analysis of figurative systems gives the criticism a degree of symbolic attentiveness.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Earnest scholarly engagement with the devotional subject matter.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Each poet-chapter reaches its conclusions about theological poetics.
- Structural complexity: 43 out of 100
- Organized by theological theme in opening chapters, then by individual poet.
How Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric is regarded
Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric holds a literary regard score of 86 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.