Reconstructing American Literary History by Sacvan Bercovitch
Published 1986 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Reconstructing American Literary History to read?
Reconstructing American Literary History scores 72 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: 65 out of 100
- Each essay deploys its own critical vocabulary; feminist and cultural theory prominent.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- Theoretical arguments about canon, ideology, and representation.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Dense with historical and critical argument across diverse areas.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct critical argument; the indirection is in the collection's cumulative effect.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical register throughout.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Critical irony toward received canon valuations.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- The collection opens debates rather than closing them.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Multi-author collection with a governing editorial argument.
How Reconstructing American Literary History is regarded
Reconstructing American Literary History holds a literary regard score of 62 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.