Satire and the Eighteenth-Century Novel by Ellen Pollak

Published 1985 · 90,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism

How hard is Satire and the Eighteenth-Century Novel to read?

Satire and the Eighteenth-Century Novel scores 54 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: 64 out of 100
Feminist and ideological criticism vocabulary, carefully deployed.
Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
Theoretical claims about genre and ideology grounded in close reading.
Information density: 72 out of 100
Rich with argument and evidence throughout.
Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
Direct polemical argument.
Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
Analytical.
Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
Irony is a primary object of analysis; the critic's own register is sharply aware.
Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
Arguments reach clear conclusions.
Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
Organized by author and text within a unified ideological framework.

How Satire and the Eighteenth-Century Novel is regarded

Satire and the Eighteenth-Century Novel holds a literary regard score of 72 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.

About the author

Ellen Pollak