Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation by Thomas McFarland
Published 1981 · 468 pages · 130,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation to read?
Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation scores 74 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: 72 out of 100
- Dense philosophical vocabulary; fluency with German idealism substantially helps.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- Highly abstract philosophical and formal argument.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Extremely dense with scholarship, quotation, and theoretical elaboration.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- The argument enacts the diasparactive form it describes.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Fragment and ruin operate as organizing metaphors with genuine analytical weight.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- The argument about incompleteness carries a wry self-awareness.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- The thesis about fragmentation means the argument deliberately resists full closure.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Elaborate digressive structure that mirrors the diasparactive forms under analysis.
How Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation is regarded
Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation holds a literary regard score of 79 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.