Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 by Richard Slotkin
Published 1973 · 252,159 words · about 19 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism
How hard is Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 to read?
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 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: 80 out of 100
- Slotkin quotes Cotton Mather, colonial captivity narratives and land pamphlets in their original spelling, then explains them in the vocabulary of myth criticism — archetype, typology, hierophany, tutelary spirit. Twelve percent of the words in the book run nine letters or longer.
- Sentence structure: 76 out of 100
- Sentences average thirty words and chain their clauses with semicolons, often holding three or four subjects in suspension before the verb arrives. This is academic prose of the early 1970s: precise, cumulative and unhurried.
- Abstraction: 84 out of 100
- The argument runs on second-order concepts — myth as a structure of consciousness, the archetype beneath the historical event, the gap between what a Puritan did and what his culture needed the deed to mean. Episodes appear to be interpreted, not narrated.
- Information density: 88 out of 100
- Six hundred and seventy pages move through Puritan sermons, Quaker tracts, almanacs, Filson's Boone, Flint's Boone, Irving, Cooper and Melville, and each reading leans on the ones before it. A reader without a grounding in colonial history will be looking things up.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Slotkin states his thesis in the first chapter and restates it at every turn, but the evidence reaches the reader at one remove — his reading of Mather's reading of Hannah Dustan's captivity.
- Symbolic density: 74 out of 100
- The book's subject is symbolism itself: the hunter, the captive, the dark wilderness, the beast that is also a god. Slotkin treats every text as one layer of a single myth, so nothing on the page stays literal for long.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- His judgement of the culture he studies stays cold and mostly unstated; the phrase 'regeneration through violence' is an accusation delivered in the voice of the accused. He rarely says outright what he thinks of Mather's delight in King Philip's death.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The book ends with Ahab and the whale rather than a way out. Slotkin shows the myth hardening into a national reflex and stops there, leaving the consequences to the two volumes that followed.
- Structural complexity: 66 out of 100
- Fourteen chapters braid three centuries, half a dozen genres and two rival Boones into one line of argument, doubling back constantly to texts already read. Chapters hand off to each other instead of closing.
How Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 is regarded
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 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.